/  3  -  3 


UNIVERSITY  of  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  A:       .MO 


NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 


NEW   LIVES   FOR  OLD 


BY 
WILLIAM   CARLETON 

AUTHOR  OF  "ONE  WAY  OUT" 

-27/6  2. 


BOSTON 

SMALL,  MAYNARD  &  COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


Copyright,  1913 

BY  SMALL,  MAYNARD  &  COMPANY 
(INCORPORATED) 

Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall 


5fcl 

t>>    O 


TO 
HOLT 

TO  WHOM  WE  IN  OUR  TOWN  OWE 
MUCH  OF  OUR  SUCCESS 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I  A  NEW  BEGINNING  .......  I 

II  MY  NEIGHBORS 21 

III  COLD  FACTS 40 

IV  A  TOWN  ASLEEP 55 

"  V  STIRRING  THINGS  UP 64 

VI  A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING 72 

__VII  THE  PIONEERS 84 

VIII  THE  NEW  WAY 100 

IX  SPRING 117 

X  RESULTS 133 

XI  A  GREAT  DAY 149 

XII  NEW  VENTURES 164 

XIII  GETTING  TOGETHER 179 

XIV  FINDING  OURSELVES 194 

XV  THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH  208 


NEW  LIVES   FOR  OLD 


NEW   LIVES    FOR   OLD 


CHAPTER  I 

2-7/52- 
A   NEW   BEGINNING 

The  first  thing  I  did  when  I  was  fairly  on 
my  feet  was  to  buy  a  farm. 

It  was  a  matter  of  sentiment  with  me.  All 
my  family  with  the  exception  of  my  father  had 
been  farmers  and  even  he,  in  his  latter  years, 
had  talked  wistfully  of  the  independence  of 
country  life.  His  father  had  owned  a  fairly 
prosperous  farm  in  New  Hampshire  and  on 
his  few  acres  had  lived  and  died.  He  had 
raised  there  wheat  for  his  flour,  wool  for  his 
clothing,  hides  for  his  shoes,  cream  for  his 
butter,  and  meat  and  vegetables  for  his  table. 
He  even  made  a  fairly  good  imitation  tea 
and  coffee  and  sweetened  the  drink  with  ma- 
ple sugar  from  his  own  trees.  Grandfather 
Carleton,  according  to  father,  could  have  built 
a  Chinese  wall  about  his  fields  and  lived  within 


2  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

its  boundaries,  asking  favor  of  no  man.  I 
suppose  it  was  the  feeling  of  independence 
coming  of  this  that  made  such  men  as  he  good 
Americans;  the  first  to  shoulder  muskets  for 
their  country,  the  first  to  shoulder  axes  and 
blaze  a  trail  through  the  wilderness. 

Ruth's  folks,  too,  had  all  been  farmers.  She 
herself  was  born  and  bred  on  a  farm  and  I 
think  it  was  that  which  gave  her  such  good 
health  and  good  courage.  Though  in  the  years 
of  our  struggle  in  the  city  I  never  heard  her 
complain,  I  knew  that  always  in  her  heart  she 
had  a  great  yearning  for  the  fields  and  open 
sky.  She  never  spoke  of  this,  but  sometimes 
Ruth  says  a  great  deal  when  she  doesn't  speak. 
I  know  when  I  first  told  her  of  my  plan  she  had 
to  swallow  hard  to  keep  from  crying. 

One  thing  alone  disturbed  Ruth  and  that  was 
the  thought  that  with  success  we  were  running 
away  from  our  new-found  friends. 

"Somehow  it  seems  as  though  we  ought  to 
stay  right  on  here  where  we've  made  good  and 
share  our  success  with  the  others,"  she  said. 

"You  talk  as  though  we'd  made  our  fortune 
and  were  going  back  to  the  fatherland,"  I  said. 

"I  feel  that  way,"  she  admitted. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "the  gang  is  part  of  me  now 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  3 

and  I  wouldn't  quit  if  I  were  worth  a  million. 
But  we're  in  a  position  where  we  can  afford 
more  elbow  room  now.  Of  course  we  can 
move  back  into  the  suburbs  again,  if  we  want 
to." 

She  shuddered  a  little  at  that. 

"Not  back  there,"  she  answered. 

"Then  the  only  other  thing  is  a  farm,"  I  said. 
"And  if  you  want,  you  can  think  of  it  as  a  farm 
for  the  whole  gang.  What  a  place  it  will  be 
for  the  kiddies ;  your  own  and  the  others !" 

That  was  all  the  cue  Ruth  needed.  On  the 
spot  she  hatched  plans  enough  to  keep  her  busy 
all  her  life.  It  looked  to  me  as  though  we'd 
need  a  Carnegie  endowment  to  carry  out  all 
her  schemes,  but  I  didn't  say  anything.  I'd 
felt  that  way  before  about  her  projects  and 
seen  her  end  by  putting  them  through  on  a 
few  dollars.  If  Ruth  had  put  into  business 
the  same  amount  of  thought  and  brains  and 
energy  that  .she  put  into  her  philanthropies  she 
would  have  made  a  fortune. 

I  went  to  a  real  estate  dealer  and  there  I 
received  my  first  surprise.  It  wasn't  my  last 
however.  Before  I  was  through  with  this 
business  I  discovered  that  I  had  as  much  to 
learn  as  I  had  during  those  first  years  as  an 


4  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

emigrant.  And  I  may  as  well  say  right  here 
that  my  experience  wasn't  the  kind  I've  read 
about  in  the  "Simple  Life"  and  "Back  to  the 
Farm"  stories.  And  because  it  was  differ- 
ent is  the  reason  I'm  writing  this.  There's 
been  just  as  much  nonsense  written  about  the 
farm  as  about  the  slums.  One  man  makes  it 
out  a  hell  on  earth  and  another  man  makes  it 
out  a  paradise  on  earth,  and  both  of  them  are 
wrong  and  both  of  them  are  right,  but  neither 
of  them  seems  to  me  to  have  got  at  the  heart 
of  the  matter. 

In  "One  Way  Out"  I  learned  to  my  own 
satisfaction  that  if  an  emigrant  .succeeds  where 
an  American  fails  it  proves  there's  something 
wrong  with  the  American.  And  there  is. 
True  as  you're  living,  there  is.  Something  is 
lacking  in  him  that  his  ancestors  had;  some- 
thing lacking  that  the  emigrant  has  to-day.  I 
thought  that  I  had  learned  this  once  for  all 
but  when  I  got  back  into  the  country  I  had  to 
learn  it  over  again.  The  conditions  were  dif- 
ferent, but  the  same  facts  held  good. 

I  received  a  surprise,  I  said,  at  the  very 
beginning.  It  came  when  the  real  estate  man 
handed  me  a  list  of  almost  a  hundred  places  for 
rent  and  for  sale — all  within  easy  reach  of  the 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  5 

city.  I  had  my  choice  of  anything  from  one 
acre  to  a  hundred  acres.  Not  only  this  but 
they  were  offered  me  almost  at  my  own  figure 
and  my  own  terms.  I  found  I  could  buy  a 
farm  as  easily  as  a  set  of  books.  I  don't  think 
the  agents  would  have  refused  a  dollar  down 
and  a  dollar  a  week. 

I  didn't  know  anything  about  real  estate 
values  then,  but  judging  from  the  prices  sub- 
urban property  was  bringing  I  had  an  idea 
that  a  fairly  decent  place  with  buildings  would 
cost  me  around  ten  thousand  dollars.  I  found 
that  for  this  sum  I  could  get  a  fourteen  room 
Colonial  house  with  land  enough  for  a  park. 
After  living  where  the  .same  amount  of  land 
would  almost  make  a  ward,  I  was  staggered. 
I  thought  there  must  be  something  crooked  in 
the  proposition.  But  I  went  to  the  other  agen- 
cies and  found  the  same  bargains  open  to  me. 
It  seemed  that  farms  were  a  drug  on  the 
market. 

And  this  was  in  a  section  of  the  country 
which  had  been  .settled  for  over  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years!  There's  something  to  think 
about  in  that.  It  was  within  a  ten  cent  car  fare 
of  a  region  which  was  absorbing  emigrants  by 
the  hundred  thousand.  It  was  on  the  very 


6  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

outskirts  of  a  city  which  was  howling  about 
congestion  and  moaning  over  the  high  cost  of 
living.  Land  was  actually  lying  idle  almost 
within  .sight  of  a  market  pleading  for  more  pro- 
duce. It  certainly  looked  queer. 

These  facts  however  didn't  concern  me  at 
the  time.  As  soon  as  I  made  sure  the  facts 
were  actually  as  represented,  I  set  about  mak- 
ing a  selection.  To  Ruth  and  me  this  was  like 
living  our  honeymoon  all  over  again.  Perhaps 
it  was  more  like  living  our  youth  again,  for  we 
hadn't  ever  passed  our  honeymoon.  I'd  go 
over  the  lists  with  her  in  the  evening  and  we'd 
check  off  the  places  that  sounded  good  to  us, 
and  then  on  the  first  fair  morning  we'd  start 
to  hunt  them  up.  She'd  leave  the  baby  at  home 
with  some  of  our  good  neighbors  and  we'd  go 
as  far  as  we  could  on  the  electric  cars  and  then 
walk.  I  wanted  to  have  a  carriage  but  she 
wouldn't  hear  of  it  because  she  wanted  to  feel 
free.  Some  days  she  pretended  we  were  gyp- 
sies and  other  days  that  we  were  two  Indians 
hunting  a  spot  to  camp.  I  didn't  mind,  because 
Dick  was  looking  after  most  of  the  business 
now  so  I  could  take  my  time  without  worrying 
about  that.  In  this  way  we  squandered  whole 
days  along  the  country  roads  going  through 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  7 

one  old  house  after  another  and  eating  our 
lunch  by  the  side  of  a  brook  or  in  a  bit  of  woods. 

I  think  there  must  have  been  something  in 
our  blood  inherited  from  our  ancestors,  for  we 
took  to  the  open  road  as  though  we'd  been 
born  by  its  side.  Oh,  but  those  were  good  days 
— those  days  when  we  wandered  about  at  our 
will  in  search  of  a  home.  It  was  June  and  the 
fields  were  full  of  flowers  and  the  air  full  of 
birds.  Ruth  knew  them  every  one  and  greeted 
them  like  old  friends,  pointing  them  out  to  me. 
I  could  tell  a  crow  from  a  robin  and  a  daisy 
from  a  buttercup,  but  that  was  about  all,  and 
yet  to  me  also  these  wild  things  were  like  old 
friends.  I  had  never  missed  them,  but  after 
the  first  day  I  knew  I  could  never  do  without 
them  again.  It  was  just  as  I  had  felt  about 
Ruth  from  the  first  time  I  saw  her. 

I  suppose  too  that  the  contrast  with  our  nar- 
row quarters  of  the  last  few  years  had  some- 
thing to  do  with  our  joy  in  the  broader  pros- 
pect. Not  that  we  had  ever  felt  crowded.  We 
had  m  our  tenement  all  the  room  we  needed 
and  our  lives  had  been  so  full  that  we  didn't 
notice  our  quarters  anyway.  Our  lives  were 
still  full  but  with  more  leisure  and  less  strain 
we  wanted  more  than  we  needed.  We  were 


8  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

like  pioneers — content  at  the  start  with  a  log 
cabin  or  even  a  tent,  but  with  prosperity  desir- 
ing larger  and  better  quarters  more  as  a  mat- 
ter of  comfort  than  necessity.  We  were  now 
ready  for  a  few  of  the  luxuries  of  life  but  we 
recognized  frankly  the  fact  that  our  new  in- 
clinations were  luxuries.  If  success  had  been 
longer  in  coming  than  it  was,  we  would  have 
remained  where  we  were  in  perfect  content- 
ment. 

It  was  hard  for  us  to  decide  on  any  of  the 
many  old  houses  we  explored  because  to  us  they 
all  looked  attractive.  The  thing  we  both  liked 
about  them  in  spite  of  signs  of  decay  was  that 
they  all  seemed  so  firmly  established.  There 
was  nothing  flimsy  about  them.  They  looked 
as  though  they  had  become  rooted  in  the  soil 
like  the  big  elms  which  grew  before  so  many 
of  them.  It  was  as  though  the  winds  and  the 
sun  and  the  rain  had  tested  them  and  found 
them  honest.  As  Ruth  said,  in  going  into  them 
you  wouldn't  feel  as  though  you  were  begin- 
ning life  again  as  you  might  in  a  brand  new 
house,  but  were  only  starting  where  the  last 
owner  left  off. 

After  our  experiences  during  the  last  few 
years  we  appreciated  such  details  as  those. 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  9 

There  had  been  times  in  the  emigrant  days 
when  way  down  deep  in  our  hearts  we  had 
felt  a  little  bit  like  people  without  a  country. 
We  were  pioneers  and  we  gloried  in  that,  but 
we  were  pioneers  without  a  fatherland.  We 
had  no  sunny  Italy,  no  emerald  isle,  no  gay 
France,  not  even  a  grim  Russia  to  talk  about 
over  a  pipe  at  the  end  of  the  day  as  our  neigh- 
bors had.  We  had  to  go  back  a  century  or 
more  to  get  home,  and  vivid  as  that  past  seemed 
at  times  it  was  distinctly  a  past  in  which  we 
had  played  no  part.  Now  out  here  in  the  coun- 
try where  we  saw  stone  walls  built  by  our  fore- 
fathers, where  the  land  had  been  tilled  by  them, 
where  trees  planted  by  them  were  still  grow- 
ing, where  if  not  direct  descendants  of  our 
own,  descendants  of  the  old  stock  still  lived, 
we  felt  closer  to  that  history.  So  we  thought 
that  if  we  went  into  one  of  the  old  houses  built 
by  our  forefathers,  it  would  bring  us  still  nearer 
home. 

We  spent  almost  a  month  this  way,  anxious 
to  draw  out  the  pleasure  as  long  as  possible. 

"I'll  know  our  home  as  soon  as  I  see  it,"  said 
Ruth ;  "I'll  recognize  it  like  an  old  friend." 

And  .so  she  did.  One  day  toward  nightfall 
— when  in  the  country  all  the  world  seems  to 


10  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

get  mellow — we  came  upon  a  little  story  and 
a  half  house  connected  by  a  shed  with  a  ram- 
shackly  looking  barn.  It  was  half  hidden  be- 
hind trees  and  lilac  bushes  on  the  top  of  a 
knoll  which  sloped  to  a  small  lake  some  fifty 
rods  distant.  There  wasn't  another  house 
within  .sight  of  it — just  woodland  and  pasture 
and  fields.  Standing  there  on  the  old  granite 
doorstep,  you  wouldn't  have  believed  there  was 
a  city  within  a  long  day's  journey. 

We  had  the  key  and  went  inside.  The  rooms 
were  low  studded  and  the  windows  came  down 
to  within  two  feet  of  the  floor.  The  ceilings 
were  discolored  and  the  paper  was  off  in  great 
patches  where  the  roof  had  leaked.  But  in 
spite  of  this  the  place  somehow  was  like  home. 
Ruth  took  my  arm  with  a  tight  squeeze  and 
looked  up  at  me. 

"This  is  it,  Billy,"  she  said. 

I  wasn't  so  sure  as  she  was  until  all  excited 
she  began  to  tell  me  what  she  was  going  to  do. 
With  the  birds  singing  outside  and  the  lazy 
sun  streaming  through  the  windows  slantwise, 
she  led  me  through  every  room,  selecting  her 
papers,  making  her  changes,  and  placing  her 
furniture. 

"We  don't  want  a  single  new  thing  in  this 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  u 

house,"  she  exclaimed.  "We  want  to  keep  it 
just  as  it  was  and  don't  you  see  how  it  was?" 

I  hadn't  ever  lived  in  the  country  and  so  I 
didn't,  but  she  made  it  so  vivid  to  me  before 
we  left  that  evening  that  I  felt  as  though  I  had 
been  born  here. 

"We  must  visit  all  the  houses  in  the  neigh- 
borhood and  buy  what  furniture  we  can  right 
here,"  she  said.  "Maybe  there'll  be  an  auc- 
tion. Country  people  are  always  selling  off 
their  old  stuff  so  we  must  keep  our  eyes  open." 

"I  should  think  it  would  be  a  lot  simpler  to 
buy  what  we  want  in  town  and  be  done  with  it," 
I  said. 

"But  we  don't  want  to  be  done  with  it,  Billy," 
she  answered.  "We  can't  come  slam  bang 
into  an  old  house  like  this.  We  must  grow  into 
it." 

She  was  so  happy  that  I  didn't  say  anything 
more.  I  knew  that  she  was  right,  whatever 
I  thought.  I'd  trust  Ruth's  instinct  against 
my  judgment  any  time. 

I  found  that  I  could  secure  some  fifty  acres 
around  the  house  and  this  was  what  pleased 
me.  The  lot  included  woodland,  pasture  and 
field,  but  mostly  pasture  grown  up  to  alders 
and  scrub  pine.  But  however  poor  the  land 


12  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

was,  it  was  land,  and  that  was  what  I  was 
hungry  for.  I  wanted  to  look  out  the  windows 
and  see  land  and  walk  over  it  and  feel  it  be- 
neath my  feet,  knowing  I  owned  it.  I  wanted 
to  feel  that  I  had  a  certain  section  of  these 
United  States  of  America  which  belonged  to 
me  and  my  heirs  forever  and  ever.  To  have 
this  would  seem  like  being  taken  into  the 
firm. 

When  I  came  to  look  up  the  deeds  I  felt  this 
more  keenly  than  ever.  I  was  able  to  trace  the 
title  back  to  an  old  Indian  grant,  for  it  had 
been1  held  in  one  family  over  two  hundred  years 
and  had  changed  title  only  twice  since  then. 
This  in  itself .  brought  history  mighty  close. 

I  bought  the  land  and  house  for  twenty-eight 
hundred  dollars — the  house  being  practically 
thrown  in.  Because  it  was  lop-sided  and  old 
and  in  need  of  repair  it  had  no  market  value 
whatever.  A  flimsily  built  modern  bungalow 
would  have  brought  more.  And  yet  when 
I  examined  the  timbers  I  found  them  of 
oak,  handhewn,  and  sound  as  a  nut.  The 
under-pinning  was  made  of  great  granite  slabs 
and  was  as  good  as  the  day  it  was  put  in, 
though  it  had  worked  askew  from  the  frost. 
Even  the  floors,  though  uneven  and  needing 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  13 

propping,  were  sound.  The  roof  boards  and 
shingles  had  of  course  rotted,  but  here  again 
the  timbers  supporting  them  had  with  time 
only  become  seasoned.  When  our  great 
grandfathers  built  houses  they  didn't  build  for 
decades  but  for  centuries.  They  didn't  reckon 
the  cost  of  the  lumber.  In  a  cottage  they  used 
beams  big  enough  to  support  a  church,  matched 
them  true  and  fastened  them  with  hand-made 
spikes  a  foot  long.  I  couldn't  have  bought  the 
lumber  alone  for  what  I  paid  for  the  house. 
I  couldn't  have  bought  it  anyway.  You  can't 
buy  such  timber  as  that  any  more. 

I  started  work  upon  it  at  once,  because  we 
wanted  to  get  in  as  soon  as  possible.  From  the 
moment  I  paid  the  first  installment — I  bought  it 
on  time  as  a  matter  of  convenience — we  felt 
this  to  be  our  home.  I  couldn't  spare  any  of 
my  own  men  just  then  and  felt  anyway  that 
as  far  as  passible  I  ought  to  use  local  labor,  so 
after  considerable  effort  I  rounded  up  three  men 
to  help  me. 

I  came  to  know  these  fellows  better  later 
on,  but  at  the  start  they  were  almost  as  foreign 
to  me  as  though  they  had  come  from  another 
country.  One  of  them  was  a  man  of  fifty,  an- 
other a  man  of  forty  and  the  third  was  a 


I4  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

young  chap  not  more  than  twenty-two  or 
three.  I'll  call  the  oldest  one  Hadley — though 
that  wasn't  his  name.  The  last  name  doesn't 
count  for  much  anyway,  because  at  the  end  of 
the  week  I  was  calling  him  Jim  and  he  was 
calling  me  Bill.  In  less  than  two  weeks  the 
children  who  used  to  come  over  to  watch  us 
were  calling  me  Bill. 

Seth  Sprague  and  Josh  Chase  will  do  as 
names  for  the  other  two  and  come  pretty  close 
to  what  their  names  really  were.  Josh  was  the 
young  fellow — a  tall,  bony  lad  with  shoulders 
already  well  rounded,  and  in  many  other  ways 
looking  as  old  as  Seth  who  might  have  been  his 
father. 

All  three  of  them  had  been  born  in  the  neigh- 
borhood and  had  lived  here  ever  since.  All 
three  of  them  came  from  old  New  England 
stock  and  had  inherited  small  farms  from  their 
fathers.  And  I  must  say  that  their  personal 
appearance  was  no  great  credit  to  that  stock. 
This  impressed  me  right  off.  Not  only  were 
their  bodies  undersized  and  spare  but  their 
faces  were  thin  and  sallow.  They  didn't  look 
healthy.  They  didn't  look  as  healthy  as  the 
average  emigrant.  And  yet  they  had  been  liv- 
ing in  the  country  all  their  lives  with  out-of- 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  15 

door  work  in  this  fine  air  .for  a  tonic  and  with 
country  food  to  nourish  them.  They  didn't 
look  dissipated — just  scrawny  and  underfed. 
If  I  had  met  one  of  them  in  the  slums  I  would 
have  said  he  was  a  case  for  the  associated 
charities.  I  doubt  if  Seth  could  have  got  past 
the  emigration  officials.  The  first  time  they 
opened  their  dinner  pails  however  I  saw  that 
I  had  missed  my  guess  about  their  being 
starved.  I  never  saw  any  three  human  beings 
get  outside  of  as  much  food  as  they  did.  Three 
or  four  eggs,  half  a  loaf  of  bread,  a  big  slab 
of  pie  and  two  or  three  doughnuts  to  a  pail, 
was  their  average  lunch.  They  saw  my  sur- 
prise and  Jim  told  a  story  fixing  it  on  Seth, 
though  I  suspect  it  was  an  old  one  round  the 
neighborhood. 

He  said  that  Seth  happened  into  the  gro- 
cery one  day  just  after  a  drummer  had  opened 
a  large  tin  of  canned  beef.  The  drummer  took 
off  a  slice  which  he  ate  with  some  crackers, 
and  then  shoved  the  can  along  to  Seth  with  the 
invitation  to  join  him.  Seth  took  out  his  pocket 
knife  and  began.  He  finished  that  pound  can 
with  the  rest  of  the  crackers  and  allowing  that 
this  sort  of  whetted  his  appetite  ordered  a  sec- 
ond can.  When  he  finished  this  the  drummer 


16  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

who  had  been  watching  in  amazement  said, 
"Don't  quit  now;  have  another."  Seth  re- 
plied that  he  didn't  mind  if  he  did  and  ate 
the  contents  of  the  third  can.  Then  closing 
his  knife  and  running  the  back  of  his  hand 
across  his  mouth,  he  gave  a  sigh  of  satisfac- 
tion. "My/'  he  said,  "but  that  was  a  juicy 
morsel." 

This  started  a  yarn  from  Seth  and  he  fixed 
his  on  Jim.  They  were  full  of  these  stories 
and  would  stop  work  a  dozen  times  a  day  to 
drawl  them  out.  Seth  said  that  a  man  who 
lived  on  the  edge  of  the  town  had  a  wife  who 
was  a  mighty  good  cook.  One  spring  she 
planned  to  go  away  for  a  week  and  visit  some 
relatives  but  before  going  she  cooked  up  enough 
food  to  last  her  husband  a  week.  He  was  a 
hearty  eater,  so  she  spent  three  or  four  days 
at  the  task.  When  it  came  time  for  supper, 
the  first  day  she  left,  the  man  felt  so  lonesome 
that  he  went  out  of  the  house  and  looked  for 
someone  to  join  him.  He  met  Jim  and  asked 
him  in.  Jim  said  that  he  had  just  had  supper 
and  wasn't  feeling  particularly  hungry,  but  that 
he  would  join  in  a  cup  of  tea  just  to  be  sociable. 
He  sat  down  at  the  table  and  ate  up  a  two 
quart  pot  of  beans  and  the  man  brought  on  a 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  17 

second  pot.  Jim  ate  that  too.  Then  the  man 
brought  out  a  pie  and  Jim  ate  that.  A  second 
one  followed,  and  to  cut  a  long  story  short, 
Jim  before  he  finished  ate  up  every  single  thing 
there  was  in  the  house.  His  host  didn't  say 
anything  until  Jim  rose  from  the  table. 
"Well,"  said  his  host,  "I'm  glad  you  didn't  come 
along  when  you  were  hungry." 

I  had  more  trouble  handling  those  three  men 
than  I've  ever  had  with  a  gang  of  a  hundred 
foreign  laborers.  They  didn't  know  enough  to 
do  the  work  properly  by  themselves  and  they 
knew  too  much  to  obey  orders.  When  it  came 
to  straightening  up  the  underpinning  I  let  them 
go  ahead  for  a  while  on  their  own  responsibil- 
ity. This  was  a  simple  task  which  three  men 
with  crow  bars  ought  to  have  done  in  half  a 
day.  At  the  end  of  the  first  half  day  they  had 
succeeded  in  harmonizing  their  various  opin- 
ions as  to  how  it  ought  to  be  done  to  the  point 
where  they  determined  they  needed  a  jack 
screw.  One  of  them  went  off  to  borrow  this 
and  when  he  returned  it  was  lunch  time.  Then 
I  took  hold  and  it  was  only  by  doing  most  of 
the  work  myself  that  we  finished  this  job  in  two 
days.  I  used  them  to  help  only  where  I  needed 
more  muscle  and  at  that  the  three  together 


i8  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

couldn't  lift  as  much  as  one  of  my  stocky,  close- 
knit  Italian  laborers. 

I  found  it  impossible  either  to  lead  or  drive 
them.  My  attempts  resulted  in  nothing  but 
longwinded  arguments  or  sulky  threats  of  leav- 
ing. And  I  was  paying  them  a  dollar  and 
seventy-five  cents  a  day  for  unskilled  labor. 
They  were  both  lazy  and  incompetent.  That's 
the  frank  truth. 

I  kept  them  along  until  the  fourth  day,  which 
was  cloudy  with  at  times  a  light  drizzling  rain. 
I  had  got  up  at  four  o'clock  in  order  to  be  at 
the  house  on  time,  for  I  was  anxious  to  get  this 
outside  work  done  as  soon  as  possible.  At 
seven  o'clock  not  one  of  the  men  had  put  in  an 
appearance.  I  waited  until  half  past  eight  and 
then  went  off  to  see  what  the  trouble  was.  I 
found  Seth  at  home  smoking  a  pipe  by  the  side 
of  the  kitchen  stove.  His  wife  was  a  pleasant 
faced  woman  and  the  inside  of  the  house  was 
as  neat  as  wax — in  marked  contrast  to  the  clut- 
ter around  the  outside. 

"What's  the  trouble?"  I  asked. 

"Dunno  of  any  trouble,"  he  answered  as 
though  surprised  by  my  question. 

"I've  been  down  to  the  house  over  an  hour 
waiting  for  you,"  I  said. 


A  NEW  BEGINNING  19 

"What  for?"  he  asked. 

"Aren't  you  going  to  work  any  more?" 

"Don't  expect  a  man  to  work  in  the  rain,  do 
you  ?"  he  answered. 

"I  guess  it's  too  much  to  expect  work  of  you 
in  any  sort  of  weather,"  I  said. 

I  paid  him  for  his  four  days  and  left  him 
growling  uncomplimentary  remarks  about  me 
to  his  wife.  I  received  the  same  reply  from 
Jim.  I  paid  him  off  too  and  went  on  in  search 
of  young  Chase.  I  thought  the  boy  and  I  to- 
gether might  be  able  to  clear  up  some  of  the  odd 
jobs.  He  wasn't  at  home.  His  mother 
thought  he  might  be  at  the  grocery  store.  I 
went  down  there  and  found  him  lolling  against 
the  counter. 

"You  aren't  afraid  of  rain  too,  are  you?"  I 
demanded.  There  were  three  other  men  there 
and  he  looked  ashamed. 

"It's  my  rheumatiz,"  he  answered,  feeling  of 
his  leg.  "It's  a  botherin'  me  a  powerful  lot  to- 
day." 

"Then  you  refuse  to  come  to  work?" 

"I'd  like  to  accommodate  ye,"  he  answered. 
"But  honest—" 

"I  don't  want  you  to  accommodate  me,"  I 
said.  "I  want  you  to  work  for  me." 


20  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

He  straightened  up  a  little  at  this  and  an- 
swered back.     "I  won't  work  in  the  rain  for  no 


man." 


He  glanced  toward  the  others  and  I  saw  them 
nod  their  approval.  This  stand  was  more  than 
I  had  expected  of  him.  It  showed  that  he  had 
some  spirit  of  a  certain  kind  after  all. 

"All  right,"  I  said.     "Here's  your  money." 

When  I  was  leaving,  he  roused  himself  once 
more.  "I  reckon  what  you  want  mister  ain't  a 
man — it's  a  Dago." 

"You're  partly  right,"  I  said;  "I  reckon  what 
I  want  is  a  Dago." 


CHAPTER  II 

MY    NEIGHBORS 

This  was  my  first  introduction  to  the  old- 
stock  farmer  of  whom  I  was  to  learn  much  more 
later  on.  Of  course  in  a  real  sense  these  men 
were  not  farmers,  and  yet  they  were  farmers 
or  nothing.  They  had  been  born  on  a  farm, 
had  spent  their  lives  there,  and  still  depended 
upon  the  land  for  whatever  means  of  livelihood 
they  had.  They  were  willing  to  work  out  as 
a  matter  of  accommodation  or  to  pick  up  an 
extra  dollar  or  so,  but  they  certainly  did  not 
class  themselves  as  laborers.  I  could  agree 
with  them  in  that,  but  neither  to  my  mind  were 
they  real  farmers;  not  as  I  conceived  farmers 
to  be  from  what  my  father  had  told  me  and 
from  what  I  read  in  the  magazines. 

I  don't  suppose  my  ideal  differed  much  from 
that  of  the  average  city  bred  man  who  has  never 
had  the  good  fortune  to  spend  even  his  vaca- 
tion in  the  country.  Perhaps  I  was  a  little 
more  visionary  about  them  than  some,  because 

21 


22  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

my  life  in  the  foreign  quarter  had  roused  my 
patriotism  and  driven  me  back  into  history  for 
comfort.  From  that  source  I  had  created  in 
my  mind  as  representative  a  tall,  gaunt  indi- 
vidual of  the  Lincoln  type  with  all  Lincoln's 
ruggedness  of  body  and  brain.  I  pictured  him 
as  honest  to  his  very  soul,  as  industrious  to  an 
extreme,  as  shrewd  and  thrifty,  as  brave  and 
long  .suffering.  So  I  still  believe  the  old  New 
Englander  to  have  been ;  so  I  believe  many  of 
them  are  to-day.  Perhaps  I  was  unfortunate 
in  finding  at  the  very  start  three  who  did  not 
live  up  to  my  standard,  but  I  want  to  put  down 
my  experiences  just  as  they  came  to  me.  If 
there  were  no  more  like  these  in  the  length  and 
breadth  of  the  whole  land,  here  at  least  were 
three.  And  they  were  of  the  genuine  old  stock, 
uncontaminated  by  a  single  drop  of  new  blood. 

I  received  from  people  who  read  "One  Way 
Out"  much  criticism  to  the  effect  that  the  ex- 
periences which  befell  me  were  not  typical ;  that 
the  conditions  which  I  encountered  would  not 
hold  in  other  places.  Perhaps  that  is  true.  I 
don't  know.  As  I  tried  to  make  clear  before, 
I'm  not  an  investigator,  nor  a  sociologist,  nor 
a  writer  of  tracts.  I  don't  claim  to  know  any 


MY  NEIGHBORS  23 

more  than  I  have  seen  with  my  own  eyes — 
than  I  have  actually  lived  through.  But  I  still 
believe  that  conditions,  whatever  they  are,  don't 
matter  if  a  man  tackles  them  in  the  right  spirit. 
I  believe  that,  because  I  see  every  day  men 
starting  even  and  one  failing  and  one  succeed- 
ing. 

What  I  said  in  "One  Way  Out"  I  want  to 
repeat  here :  I'm  authority  on  nothing  but  my- 
self. Just  as  Ruth  and  I,  driven  on  by  cir- 
cumstances, went  adventuring  in  the  slums,  so 
driven  on  by  other  if  not  such  urgent  circum- 
stances we  went  adventuring  in  the  country. 
And  I  approached  my  new  and  later  life  in  a 
state  of  just  as  much  absolute  ignorance  as  I 
did  the  first.  It  was  chance  that  led  me  to 
locate  where  I  did,  it  was  chance  which  fur- 
nished me  with  my  neighbors;  it  was  chance 
which  furnished  me  with  my  opportunity.  If 
this  led  me  into  an  unexplored  country  and 
along  paths  never  before  trod  by  man,  I  thank 
my  lucky  stars.  I  don't  believe  it,  but  I'm  will- 
ing to  let  it  go  at  that.  I'm  not  much  on  argu- 
ment. 

This  then  is  a  plain  statement  of  what  I  saw 
with  my  new  eyes — the  eyes  of  an  immigrant 
into  the  country.  It  is  a  plain  statement  of  what 


24  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

I  did  and  what  I  learned  and  the  people  I  met. 
I  don't  claim  that  it's  either  typical  or  impor- 
tant. The  life  of  one  man  isn't  apt  to  be.  Here 
it  is,  however,  without  any  further  explanation 
or  apology,  for  what  it's  worth,  and  if  anyone 
gets  as  much  fun  out  of  reading  it  as  I  have  had 
in  living  it,  I  won't  consider  I've  wasted  my 
time  in  writing  it. 

I  proceeded  to  act  at  once  on  Seth's  idea.  I 
remembered  having  seen,  back  on  the  road,  a 
little  place  which  at  the  time  I  had  thought 
looked  like  the  home  of  some  foreign-born  pio- 
neer. It  bore  all  the  earmarks;  it  was  an  un- 
kempt but  busy  looking  place.  There  were  evi- 
dences of  many  children  and  a  consequent  clut- 
ter of  tin  cans,  broken  bottles  and  old  shoes,  but 
I  saw  no  farming  tools  and  broken  down  wag- 
ons in  the  yard.  These  things  were  all  under 
cover  in  the  shed.  I  noticed  too  that  the  yard 
was  full  of  chickens  and  that  every  square  foot 
of  land  around  the  house  was  being  tilled. 
When  I  knocked  at  the  door  a  woman  ap- 
peared with  a  child  in  her  arms  and  with  half 
a  dozen  more  clinging  to  her  .skirts.  She  was 
a  red-cheeked,  black-eyed  woman,  as  plump  and 
happy  looking  as  you  would  ask  to  see.  Some- 
how I  felt  instantly  at  home  here.  I  surprised 


MY  NEIGHBORS  25 

her  by  asking  in  Italian  where  her  man  was, 
and  she  answered  that  he  was  out  back  of  the 
barn  and  bade  one  of  the  boys  to  run  and  fetch 
him  for  the  signor.  I  said  no,  that  I  would  go 
and  find  him  myself.  She  protested  that  the 
signor  would  get  wet  and  that  he  had  better 
come  in  and  wait.  I  felt  half  ashamed  that  she 
should  class  me  with  that  sort  of  coddled  signor 
and  hurried  off  to  find  Tony. 

I  found  him  in  an  old  hat  and  gray  sweater, 
up  to  his  knees  in  the  black  soil.  He  was  a 
swarthy,  well-muscled  chap,  with  a  face  tanned 
to  the  color  of  sole  leather.  He  looked  like  a 
villain  of  melodrama,  but  as  I  approached  he 
smiled  a  greeting  which  revealed  teeth  as  nat- 
urally white  as  a  hound's.  A  couple  of  mon- 
grel pups  were  nosing  at  his  heels  and  ran  at 
me  ferociously,  but  stopped  half  way  and 
wagged  their  tails.  With  an  oath  in  Italian  he 
ordered  them  back  and  belly  to  the  ground  they 
obeyed  him. 

I  introduced  myself  and  he  recognized  my 
name  at  once  for  the  fame  of  Carleton's  gang 
had  by  now  spread  far. 

"I  have  two  cousins  working  for  you,"  he 
said  in  a  manner  that  made  me  feel  it  a  compli- 
ment. 


26  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

He  told  me  their  names  and  I  remembered 
them  well.  They  were  good  workmen. 

"I've  bought  a  house  near  you,"  I  said.  "I 
need  a  man  or  two  to  help  me.  Do  you  want  a 
job?" 

"Ah,  signor,"  he  replied  with  a  shake  of  his 
head  in  apology,  "if  I  did  not  have  so  much  to 
do  here." 

He  waved  his  hand  over  the  scant  two  acres 
of  land  back  of  him  as  though  it  were  a  princi- 
pality. 

"This  is  all  yours  ?"  I  asked. 

"Yes,"  he  answered  proudly.  "This — the 
house — everything." 

"You  are  doing  well  then." 

"Well  enough,"  he  answered  with  a  shrug 
of  his  shoulders  and  a  smile. 

"Then  I  can't  hire  you?" 

"It  would  be  impossible,  signer,"  he  an- 
swered, as  though  some  apology  were  due  me. 
"The  planting  is  not  yet  done.  And — by  the 
good  Christ — there  are  a  thousand  things  to  do 
on  an  estate." 

It  was  good  to  hear  the  way  he  pronounced 
that  word  estate.  There  was  enough  dignity 
in  it  to  make  it  seem  in  .sober  earnest  like  an 
estate. 


MY  NEIGHBORS  27 

"Do  you  know  of  anyone  I  can  get  ?"  I  asked. 

"There  is  Signer  Chase,"  he  began. 

But  I  shut  him  off.  "Any  of  your  country- 
men, I  mean." 

"There  is  Dardoni;  he  might  have  a  man. 
But  no — not  in  the  spring.  There  are  my 
wife's  cousins.  They  have  just  come  over.  I 
could  send — " 

"No,"  I  interrupted,  "I  can  get  men  enough 
in  the  city." 

"I  believe  you,  signer,"  he  answered  with  a 
bow. 

I  started  to  leave  when  rather  hesitatingly  he 
asked  if  I  wouldn't  be  good  enough  to  step  into 
the  house  and  have  a  glass  of  wine  with  him. 
He  had  so  interested  me  and  what  he  said  had 
so  whetted  my  curiosity  that  I  gladly  accepted. 
He  preceded  me  to  the  house  and  at  the  door 
called  loudly  for  Maria.  She  came  with  her 
cheeks  redder  than  ever  and  with  the  children 
clinging  about  her  skirts,  ushered  us  into  the 
living  room.  There  was  no  such  neatness  here 
as  I  had  seen  in  the  Sprague  house.  All  was 
confusion ;  a  mixture  of  sewing  and  play  things 
and  garlic-flavored  cooking.  What  can  one  do 
with  six  children  to  feed  and  clothe?  Maria 
made  no  apologies.  This  was  home  and  home 


28  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

to  her  was  a  plant  for  the  rearing  of  children. 
We  seated  ourselves  at  a  bare  wooden  table  and 
she  brought  out  a  bottle  of  red  wine  as  light 
as  new  cider.  I  drank  good  health  to  Maria 
and  success  to  Tony. 

I  asked  him  many  questions  out  of  honest  in- 
terest and  he  answered  me  frankly  and  with  ea- 
gerness as  your  true  pioneer  ever  does  because 
of  pride  in  his  accomplishments.  He  told  me 
that  he  had  come  here  three  years  ago  to  work 
for  Dardoni  who  had  a  grand  estate — ten  times 
as  large  as  his — on  the  other  side  of  the  town. 
He  had  saved  a  little  money  before  he  came 
and  with  that,  and  what  he  earned  later,  he 
had  bought  these  few  acres  of  his  own.  Since 
then  he  had  earned  his  living  and  something 
over.  The  thing  that  impressed  me  at  the  time, 
but  the  full  significance  of  which  I  did  not  real- 
ize until  later,  was  that  he  found  a  market  for 
his  eggs  and  produce  right  here  in  the  village. 
Some  of  it  he  exchanged  at  the  store  for  gro- 
ceries but  much  of  it  he  sold  from  door  to  door. 
It  sounded  like  carrying  coals  to  Newcastle. 

I  passed  a  pleasant  hour  with  Tony  and  then 
went  back  to  my  house  where  I  puttered  around 
the  rest  of  the  day  doing  odd  jobs.  When  I 
came  home  that  night  and  told  my  experiences 


MY  NEIGHBORS  29 

to  Ruth  she  only  laughed  to  herself  and  made 
no  comment.  I  told  her  I  was  going  to  take 
four  or  five  of  my  own  men  out  there  next  day 
and  she  said  she  guessed  I  would  save  time  that 
way. 

From  that  point  on,  the  work  went  along 
swimmingly.  After  getting  all  the  buildings 
straightened  up  I  brought  down  a  couple  of 
carpenters  to  do  the  shingling.  At  different 
times  Seth  and  Jim  and  Josh  came  along  to 
watch  proceedings.  They  bore  no  ill  will  and 
offered  me  plenty  of  advice.  At  first  I  resented 
this,  but  after  a  while  I  learned  not  to  mind.  I 
couldn't  help  liking  the  men  after  a  fashion  and 
I  enjoyed  their  stories.  They  took  as  paternal 
an  interest  in  my  affairs  as  though  I  were  a 
tenant  and  they  were  landlords.  They  were 
like  children  in  the  intimate  questions  they 
asked,  but  I  found  that  they  were  not  at  all  dis- 
turbed if  they  received  no  replies. 

After  the  shingling  I  began  on  the  plastering. 
I  knocked  down  the  old  plastering  in  every  room 
and  found  that  the  lathing  was  all  of  the  old 
split-board  kind.  This  really  made  a  stronger 
and  firmer  background  than  the  modern  lath- 
ing. I  made  another  find ;  two  fireplaces  which 
had  been  bricked  up  to  accommodate  air-tight 


30  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

stoves.  I  was  mighty  well  pleased  with  this 
because  I'm  fond  of  fireplaces  and  had  won- 
dered how  I  was  going  to  build  one  without 
tearing  the  house  half  to  pieces. 

The  next  thing  we  did  was  to  putty  up  the 
holes  and  cracks  and  paint  every  speck  of  wood 
inside  and  out  a  dead  white.  Ruth  insisted  on 
white. 

"Somehow  I  wouldn't  feel  I  was  living  in  the 
country  if  my  house  wasn't  white,"  she  said. 

I  agreed  with  her,  for  to  my  mind  there's  no 
color  so  fresh  and  bright  looking.  And  the 
very  first  coat  brought  the  old  house  to  life. 
It's  wonderful  what  paint  will  do.  It  didn't 
make  the  house  look  new  in  the  sense  of  making 
it  appear  like  a  house  of  to-day,  but  rather  car- 
ried it  back  to  its  youth.  It  was  like  making  an 
old  man  young  again.  We  could  hardly  wait 
for  the  paint  to  dry  before  starting  the  second 
coat,  and  that  carried  us  back  another  twenty- 
five  years.  Even  Seth,  who  at  the  start  had 
allowed  that  the  old  shack  wasn't  worth  repair- 
ing, admitted  now  that  it  began  to  look  real 
nifty. 

And  the  inside  looked  as  fine  as  the  outside. 
When  we  began,  the  woodwork  was  discolored 
both  by  age  and  dirt.  This  made  the  whole  in- 


MY  NEIGHBORS  31 

terior  look  worse  than  a  cheap  tenement. 
Twenty  dollars'  worth  of  white  lead  and  oil 
changed  this  as  though  by  magic  into  a  clean 
white,  as  fresh  as  when  the  house  was  first  built. 
There  is  nothing  which  shows  age  more  than 
paint  and  there's  nothing  so  easily  remedied. 
If  the  owners  had  done  what  I  had  already  done 
they  would  have  made  almost  three  hundred 
per  cent,  interest  on  their  investment.  In 
three  weeks,  at  a  cost  of  four  hundred  dollars, 
I  had  added  fifteen  hundred  in  value  to  the 
place.  And  it  was  a  legitimate  value.  My 
paint  hadn't  covered  up  defects;  it  had  simply 
brought  out  the  honest  worth  of  the  structure. 
With  the  floors  painted  and  the  windows 
drawn,  we  were  now  ready  for  the  personal  de- 
tails which  should  make  this  house  into  a  home. 
It  was  then  that  we  had  a  great  stroke  of  luck 
in  hearing  of  an  auction  in  another  village  some 
eight  miles  away  and  off  the  main  road.  Seth 
told  us  about  it  and  said  if  I  was  looking  for 
old  trash  he  reckoned  I  could  find  enough  of  it 
there.  He  said  he  wouldn't  give  a  quarter  for 
the  whole  lot,  which  didn't  sound  very  encour- 
aging. But  Ruth  said  she  had  heard  them  talk 
like  that  before,  and  anyway  it  would  be  good 
fun  to  go. 


32  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

One  clear  summer  morning  then  we  rose 
early  and  Ruth  put  up  a  lunch  and  we  boarded 
the  train.  The  nearest  station  was  five  miles 
away  and  there  we  hired  an  old  white  horse  and 
a  buggy.  We  jogged  along  over  the  country 
roads  at  a  three-mile-an-hour  clip  and  reached 
the  place  just  before  the  auction  started  at  ten 
o'clock.  We  found  some  thirty  or  forty  na- 
tives there.  Most  of  them  had  come  just  to 
look  on.  They  always  had  time  for  that.  Even 
in  the  busiest  season  it  was  as  easy  to  gather  a 
crowd  in  these  out-of-the-way  places  as  it  is 
during  the  noon  hour  on  Broadway.  And 
they  wouldn't  come  for  an  hour,  but  for  all  day. 

We  found  rather  a  romantic  story  in  connec- 
tion with  this  auction.  The  story  ran,  and  I 
guess  it  was  true,  that  the  man  who  had  been 
living  here  as  a  bachelor  for  forty  years  had  or- 
iginally built  and  furnished  this  house  for  his 
bride.  Just  before  they  were  to  be  married  she 
had  died  and  he  had  moved  into  the  house  and 
lived  here  by  himself  until  his  own  death. 

When  Ruth  heard  that,  she  said  to  me, 
"Billy,  do  you  know  I  think  he'd  be  glad  for  us 
to  have  his  things." 

"I  don't  know  how  he'd  feel  about  me,  but  I'm 


MY  NEIGHBORS  33 

dead  sure  he'd  be  glad  for  you  to  have  them/'  I 
said. 

"He  wouldn't  if  it  wasn't  for  you,"  she  an- 
swered, with  a  smile. 

I'm  not  saying  she  was  right  in  this  deduc- 
tion but  I  made  up  my  mind  she'd  have  what- 
ever she  liked  at  that  auction  if  it  broke  me. 

There's  a  lot  in  luck  at  auctions — for  the 
buyer.  And  we  were  certainly  in  luck  that 
day.  There  were  no  stray  automobile  parties 
in  the  group  to  boost  things  up  for  the  fun  of 
it,  and  no  professional  furniture  buyers.  It 
was  a  real  country  auction  with  a  country 
auctioneer  and  a  country  crowd.  Seth  and 
Jim  and  Josh  were  there  and  the  rest  of  the 
group  was  all  of  their  kind.  Both  the  men 
and  the  women  looked  bloodless  and  withered. 
It  showed  in  their  faded  eyes,  in  their  sallow 
cheeks,  in  their  spare  bodies.  They  seemed  old 
and  tired — even  the  young  women.  And  the 
strange  thing  about  it  was  that  to  me  they 
looked  like  foreigners.  I  felt  as  though  I  had 
come  into  some  distant  country  among  a  new 
people.  I  couldn't  seem  to  connect  them  with 
America;  even  with  the  America  of  history. 
It  took  an  effort  on  my  part  to  remember  that 


34  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

the  names  they  bore  were  the  names  borne  by 
many  of  those  who  settled  in  Plymouth. 

I  asked  Ruth  if  she  felt  that  way  and  after 
thinking  a  moment  she  answered,  "Not  as  much 
as  you  do." 

Still  I  ,saw  she  knew  there  was  something 
wrong  with  them  because  she  kept  looking  at 
the  women  with  almost  a  sad  expression. 
Once,  she  said,  "There's  something  to  do  here, 
Billy." 

"Missionary  work?"  I  asked. 

She  nodded. 

"But  this  isn't  Africa,"  I  laughed.  "This 
is  the  United  States  of  America.  It's  a  fact 
and  we  mustn't  forget  it." 

"No,"  she  said,  "that  is  just  what  we  must 
remember." 

"And  most  of  these  people  are  descendants 
of  the  Mayflower.  They  are  relatives  of 
ours." 

"Yes,"  she  said  soberly,  "we  must  remember 
that,  too." 

But  the  auctioneer  was  begging  our  kind  at- 
tention to  examine  a  collection  of  extremely 
useful  articles  which  he  announced  he  was  go- 
ing to  include  in  a  single  parcel.  Into  an  old 
tin  pan  he  counted  one  by  one  a  rusty  egg 


MY  NEIGHBORS  35 

beater,  two  iron  spoons,  a  kitchen  knife,  three 
glass  preserve  jars,  a  doughnut  cutter,  a 
crockery  door  knob  and  finally  a  dozen  ordi- 
nary tin  coffee  cans.  Then  with  his  hands  on 
his  hips  he  stood  back  and  beamed  with  pride 
upon  the  collection. 

"How  much  for  the  lot !"  he  demanded. 

He  himself  looked  like  one  of  the  odds  and 
ends  he  was  selling.  Though  not  over  thirty- 
five  he  was  round  shouldered  and  dyspeptic. 
He  wore  glasses  and  though  smooth  shaven 
his  beard  still  showed.  His  clothes  hung 
loosely  about  his  spare  frame  and  he  seemed  to 
be  always  in  pain. 

The  bids  started  at  two  cents  and  quickly 
went  to  five,  while  the  crowd  laughed  good  na- 
turedly. 

I  gained  a  better  impression  of  the  auction- 
eer right  off  by  the  earnest,  sober  way  he  went 
at  his  business.  He  had  a  trick  of  leaning 
over  the  crowd  with  his  long  bony  finger 
outstretched  and  calling  earnestly,  "Once, 
twice — "  with  a  little  pause  there  which  made 
you  feel  as  though  you  were  missing  a  great 
opportunity. 

"Twice,"  he  repeated,  and  in  the  excitement 
of  the  moment  I  was  on  the  point  of  bidding 


36  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

six  when  he  brought  both  hands  together  with 
the  decisiveness  of  a  decree  of  Fate  and  I  es- 
caped. 

Ruth  had  detected  my  temptation  and  pulled 
at  mv  sleeve. 

tf 

"Look  here,  Billy,"  she  warned,  "you 
mustn't  bid  on  anything  except  what  we  really 
want." 

"Think  of  all  those  things  going  for  five 
cents,"  I  answered. 

"And  when  the  man  gets  home  with  them 
he'll  wonder  why  he  ever  bid  two,"  she  said. 

The  auctioneer  disposed  of  the  culch  first 
and  always  found  a  bidder  if  only  for  a  worth- 
less basket  filled  with  broken  bottles.  And 
there  wasn't  a  man  who  bought  those  things 
who  didn't  have  his  wood  shed  cluttered  up 
with  similar  waste. 

Finally  he  came  to  six  wooden  kitchen 
chairs.  They  were  painted  yellow  and  had 
seats  three  inches  thick.  They  were  hand 
made  and  fastened  together  with  wooden  pegs 
instead  of  nails  and  were  as  stout  as  when  first 
built.  Ruth  had  picked  these  out  at  once. 

"I'd  better  start  them  at  a  quarter,"  I  said. 

"No,"  she  whispered,  "you  keep  quiet.  Let 
me  do  the  bidding." 


MY  NEIGHBORS  37 

"How  much  a  piece  for  the  lot?"  inquired 
the  auctioneer. 

The  man  who  had  the  adjoining  farm  started 
them  at  two  cents. 

"Why  you'd  pay  more  than  that  for  kindling 
wood,"  exclaimed  the  auctioneer.  "But  two 
I'm  offered.  Will  anyone  make  it  three?" 

I  nudged  Ruth  but  she  didn't  open  her 
mouth. 

"Three,"  called  someone. 

"Three  I'm  offered,  who'll  make  it  four?" 

No  one  answered. 

"Three  I'm  offered,  once, — 

I  nudged  Ruth  again  but  she  remained  as 
though  dumb.  I  was  standing  on  tiptoe. 

"Three    I'm    offered;    twice.     Going,    go- 

ing-" 

I  was  all  out  of  breath  when  Ruth  spoke  up 
as  cool  as  you  please,  "Four." 

"Four  I'm  offered." 

He  extended  his  finger  towards  the  first  bid- 
der. 

"Now  make  it  five,"  the  auctioneer  coaxed. 

The  man  shook  his  head. 

"Make  it  a  half." 

Again  the  man  shook  his  head. 

"I'm  offered  four  cents  a  piece  for  these  fine 


38  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

hardwood  chairs.  Make  it  a  half.  Make  it 
a  quarter.  Going — going — " 

He  paused  again  with  an  eager  tantalizing 
smile.  Then  he  brought  his  hands  together. 

"And  sold  to  Mr.—" 

"Carleton,"  I  answered  quickly. 

"Oh,"  gasped  Ruth.     "They  are  ours!" 

We  bought  another  lot  of  eight  at  twelve 
cents  a  piece.  We  bought  a  third  lot,  cane 
seated  and  painted  a  handsome  black,  for  nine 
cents.  Besides  this  we  bought  a  mahogany 
veneered  bureau  with  old  brass  handles,  in  per- 
fect condition,  for  four  dollars  and  a  quarter. 
I  learned  later  that  it  was  worth  at  least  twenty- 
five  dollars.  We  bought  a  grandfather's 
clock  with  pine  case  and  wooden  works,  made 
in  Winchester,  England,  for  thirteen  dollars 
and  a  half.  We  bought  a  solid  mahogany 
four-poster  bed  for  twenty-two  dollars.  We 
bought  a  hardwood  kitchen  table  for  two  dol- 
lars. We  bought  three  feather  beds  at  a  dol- 
lar and  a  half  a  piece — the  goose  feathers  alone 
in  each  being  worth  five  or  six  dollars.  We 
bought  a  set  of  black  and  white  ware  con- 
sisting of  a  tea  pot,  sugar  bowl,  milk  pitcher, 
and  nine  cups  and  saucers,  in  perfect  condition, 
for  five  dollars — less  than  you'd  pay  for  or- 


MY  NEIGHBORS  39 

dinary  crockery.  We  bought  a  mahogany 
veneered  kitchen  clock  for  two  dollars.  We 
bought  a  bird's  eye  maple,  rope  bed  for  four 
dollars.  In  addition  to  this  we  bought  beauti- 
ful old  bed  spreads  and  rag  rugs  and  mirrors 
—all  for  a  song.  In  fact,  we  took  about  every- 
thing in  the  house  that  was  of  any  value  and 
paid  less  than  ten  cents  on  a  dollar  for  what 
it  was  worth  merely  as  furniture,  and  less  than 
two  cents  for  what  most  of  it  should  have 
brought  as  antiques. 

I  accomplished  two  things  that  day;  I  fur- 
nished my  house  for  a  song  and  I  introduced 
myself  to  my  future  neighbors,  for  my  reckless 
buying  became  the  gossip  of  the  neighborhood. 


CHAPTER  III 

COLD    FACTS 

It  was  the  middle  of  August  when  we 
moved  into  our  new  home,  and  on  the  second 
Saturday  following  we  gave  a  house  warming. 
When  we  left  our  tenement  we  told  our  friends 
that  instead  of  saying  good-by  to  them  there 
we  meant  to  say  howdy  at  the  new  home.  And 
so  this  party  was  principally  for  them,  although 
through  the  local  paper  we  sent  out  a  general 
invitation  to  everyone  in  the  neighborhood. 

We  swept  up  the  barn  floor  and  set  a  long 
table  there,  improvised  out  of  boards  and  saw 
horses.  Ruth  decorated  it  with  green  and 
with  wild  flowers.  We  served  cold  meats, 
bread  and  butter,  ice  cream  and  cake,  coffee 
and  milk,  to  some  seventy-five  grown-ups  and 
Lord  knows  how  many  children.  The  latter 
made  the  whole  country-side  spring  to  life  as 
though  by  magic.  If  a  happier,  more  en- 
thusiastic group  than  our  former  neighbors 
ever  gathered  together  under  one  roof  I'd  like 

40 


COLD  FACTS  41 

to  see  them.  Ruth,  Dick,  and  myself  acted  as 
waiters,  with  plenty  of  assistance  from  every- 
one, and  saw  to  it  that  all  had  as  much  as  they 
could  eat. 

The  village  people  came  more  out  of  curi- 
osity than  anything  else,  I  imagine.  Ed  Bar- 
clay, the  auctioneer,  was  there  and  I  liked 
him  even  better  than  at  first  on  further  ac- 
quaintance. Seth,  Josh  and  Jim  turned  up  in 
spite  of  their  aversion  to  Dagoes.  Then  the 
Reverend  Percy  Cunningham,  pastor  of  the 
Methodist  Church,  came  with  his  wife.  He 
was  a  slight,  very  serious  man,  dressed  in  black 
like  an  undertaker.  Deacon  Weston,  said  to 
be  the  richest  man  in  town,  also  dropped  in  for 
a  minute  and  bade  me  welcome.  He  had  a 
thin,  hard  face  that  hinted  as  to  how  he  had 
acquired  his  wealth,  and  later  I  found  out  that 
my  guess  was  sound.  Horatio  Moulton,  who 
kept  the  village  store,  was  another  who  stopped 
to  shake  hands. 

But  the  fellow  out  of  the  whole  lot  who  in- 
terested me  most  was  Guiseppe  Dardoni,  the 
landed  proprietor  of  whom  Tony  had  spoken 
to  me.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that  financially  he 
was  one  of  the  strongest  men  in  town  he  was 
never  called  anything  but  Joe — not  so  much 


42  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

in  a  spirit  of  good  fellowship  as  with  the  easy 
familiarity  people  speak  to  a  Chinaman  or  a 
no-account  Indian.  He  never  resented  the 
slight  openly,  but  I  had  long  since  learned  that 
these  people  appreciate  being  given  the  dignity 
of  their  full  name. 

Signor  Dardoni  was  a  man  of  forty-five,  I 
should  judge.  He  was  slight  and  wiry  of 
build,  with  a  kindly  face  and  smiling  eyes. 
His  hair  was  turning  gray  and  he  was 
extremely  courteous  and  gentle  mannered. 
Neither  in  dress  nor  speech  did  he  betray  the 
fact  that  he  was  any  more  prosperous  than 
most  of  his  fellow  citizens.  I  noticed  however 
that  he  drove  up  with  his  daughter  behind  a 
very  good  horse  and  in  a  well-kept  sulky.  He 
greeted  everyone  with  a  good-natured  smile, 
and  Seth  who  happened  to  be  standing  near  in- 
troduced us. 

"Joe,"  he  said,  "let  me  make  ye  'quainted 
with  Bill  Carleton  who's  figgerin'  on  settlin' 
here." 

"I've  heard  much  of  you,"  I  said  to  him, 
speaking  in  Italian,  to  Seth's  disgust. 

"And  I  have  heard  much  of  Signor  Carleton. 
But  you  have  traveled  in  Italy?"  he  asked. 

"Yes,"  I  answered,  "in  Little  Italy." 


COLD  FACTS  43 

He  laughed  at  that  and  I  took  him  to  meet 
Ruth.  Later  we  adjourned  into  the  house 
where,  over  a  bottle  of  smuggled  Italian  wine, 
which  one  of  the  boys  had  given  me,  I  learned 
more  about  him.  We  passed  a  pleasant  half 
hour  and  when  he  left  I  told  him  that  I  wanted 
to  come  over  and  visit  him. 

"I  want  to  see  how  you  manage  your  farm," 
I  said. 

"I  shall  be  honored,"  he  said  with  the  sin- 
cere but  exaggerated  politeness  of  his  race. 
"But  it  is  not  much,  just  a  few  acres." 

It  was  not  until  midnight  that  the  last  of 
our  guests  left,  for  Pelletti,  who  had  brought 
along  his  fiddle,  furnished  music  for  a  dance. 
It  would  have  done  your  heart  good  to  watch 
those  people  dance — especially  the  girls.  The 
fiddle  seemed  to  become  part  of  them.  Before 
we  knew  it  Ruth  and  I  were  on  the  floor  and 
Dick  had  seized  Lucia,  Dardoni's  oldest 
daughter,  and  followed  at  our  heels. 

It  was  right  after  this  that  I  began  to  plan 
the  development  of  my  farm.  It  was  of  course 
much  too  late  in  the  season  for  me  to  attempt 
to  plant  anything.  However  there  were  many 
other  things  about  the  place  that  needed  atten- 
tion. I  hired  Hadley  by  the  month  to  help 


44  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

me  and  started  in  at  once  clearing  up  gener- 
ally. I  had  him  repair  the  walls  and  fences, 
cut  bushes,  trim  the  trees,  and  do  the  chores 
around  the  house.  I  bought  a  cow  for  the  sake 
of  having  our  own  milk  for  the  kiddies,  and  so 
he  also  had  her  to  look  after.  I  paid  him  forty 
dollars  a  month  and  it  was  all  he  was  worth. 
Dick  and  I  used  to  do  as  much  every  Saturday 
afternoon  as  he  did  through  the  week. 

I  made  one  other  investment  this  season;  I 
bought  a  second  hand  automobile.  This  made 
me  independent  of  trains  and  allowed  me  many 
an  odd  hour  at  home  which  otherwise  I  would 
have  lost.  I  could  make  the  run  from  my  office 
to  the  house  in  thirty-five  minutes,  but  the 
thing  cost  me  first  and  last  a  good  deal  of 
money.  It  didn't  take  me  a  month  to  learn 
that  anyone  who  figures  on  saving  car  fare 
with  one  of  them  makes  a  mistake.  However, 
I  figured  that  we  would  save  enough  in  other 
ways  to  make  up  for  this  added  expense. 
Here  again  I  soon  learned  I  was  mistaken,  and 
that  brought  me  face  to  face  with  a  new  rev- 
elation which  knocked  sky  high  some  of  my 
preconceived  notions.  We  found  when  we 
came  to  settle  our  first  month's  store  bill  that 
it  was  costing  as  much  and  in  some  cases  more 


COLD  FACTS  45 

for  our  food  stuffs  than  it  had  cost  in  the  city. 
When  Ruth  came  to  me  with  the  bills  and  I 
looked  them  over  I  was  astonished  to  find  that 
the  prices  even  for  eggs  and  butter  were  those 
current  in  town ;  that  such  staples  as  sugar  and 
flour  and  lard  were  if  anything  a  little  higher 
and  that  for  vegetables  we  were  actually  pay- 
ing more  than  we  did  at  the  city  market  when 
Ruth  was  doing  her  own  marketing. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "what  do  you  make  out  of 
this?" 

"I  don't  understand  about  the  butter  and 
eggs,"  she  said,  "but  of  course  I  don't  have 
the  chance  here  that  I  used  to  have  to  get  cut 
prices  on  the  other  things." 

"I  know,"  I  said,  "but  these  men  don't  have 
to  pay  high  rents  or  an  expensive  staff  of 
clerks.  They  don't  even  advertise.  It  looks 
to  me  as  though  our  friend  Moulton  was  tak- 
ing advantage  of  us.  Probably  he  thinks  we're 
city  folks  and  don't  care  what  we  pay." 

This  was  in  September  and  there  wasn't  an 
item  on  our  bill  that  did  not  equal  or  exceed 
town  prices  for  the  best.  Taking  into  account 
the  fact  that,  as  Ruth  said,  there  were  no  bar- 
gain sales,  it  is  easy  to  see  that  where  we  had 
looked  for  a  reduction  in  living  expenses  we 


46  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

had  really  met  with  a  substantial  increase. 
Not  only  this,  but  in  most  cases  the  goods  we 
received  were  inferior  to  those  we  secured  in 
town.  As  for  meats,  the  prices  charged  were 
exorbitant. 

Now  neither  Ruth  nor  I  had  reached,  or  ever 
will  I  trust,  a  point  where  we  didn't  care  how 
much  we  were  paying.  The  lesson  of  the 
ginger  jar  was  too  firmly  implanted  for  us  to 
accept  without  a  question,  as  we  did  when  we 
were  living  in  the  suburbs,  whatever  we  might 
be  charged.  But  aside  from  this  I  was  gen- 
uinely interested  in  the  economic  side  of  the 
matter.  I  wanted  to  know  how  this  condition 
of  things  happened  to  exist.  It  looked  to  me 
on  the  face  of  it  as  though  there  was  something 
wrong  in  having  to  pay  as  much  in  the  coun- 
try for  butter,  eggs,  vegetables  and  poultry 
as  we  had  to  pay  in  the  city.  So  I  went  down 
to  the  village  and  had  an  interview  with  my 
fat  friend  Moulton.  He  welcomed  me  cor- 
dially and  listened  to  my  questions  with  a 
smile. 

"I'm  not  kicking  on  your  making  a  fair 
profit,"  I  told  him,  "but  I  simply  can't  figure 
out  why  it's  necessary  for  you  to  charge  so 
much  in  order  to  do  it.  If  you  can  show  me, 


COLD  FACTS  47 

I'll  trade  with  you;  if  you  can't  I'm  going  to 
trade  in  town  after  this." 

"That's  right,"  he  nodded,  "I  hear  your  kick 
every  year  from  summer  folks.  They  come  up 
here  to  save  money  and  go  away  sore  because 
they  don't." 

"But  why  don't  they?"  I  demanded. 

"  'Cause  I  have  to  make  a  profit  in  order  to 
live,"  he  answered.  "Now  look  a-here,  I  ain't 
so  big  a  corporation  that  I  have  to  hide  my 
books  to  steer  clear  of  an  investigation  from 
Congress.  If  you've  got  a  spare  hour  I'll  show 
you  some  things  that  city  folks  don't  reckon 
on." 

And  he  did.  I'll  give  him  credit  for  making 
the  whole  business  clear  to  me  in  less  than  an 
hour.  He  opened  my  eyes  to  a  few  facts  that 
I've  never  seen  mentioned  in  any  fairy  dreams 
about  the  simple  life  that  I've  ever  read.  And 
what  is  more  they  were  cold  facts  that  don't 
seem  to  get  into  even  the  heavier  treatises  on 
New  England  life. 

In  the  first  place,  he  proved  to  me  with  his 
books,  that  he  bought  not  only  his  staples  from 
the  city  market,  but  even  his  produce. 

"I  can't  buy  a  pound  of  decent  butter  here," 
he  said.  "The  farmer's  butter  you  hear  so 


48  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

much  about  isn't  made  any  more;  what  little 
is  made  is  loaded  down  with  salt  to  a  point 
where  you  couldn't  pay  'em  twenty  cents  a 
pound  for  it.  I  can't  buy  a  decent  chicken. 
All  they  bring  in  here  are  the  old  fowls  that 
you  couldn't  cut  up  with  a  broad  ax." 

"What  do  they  do  with  their  chickens?"  I 
asked. 

"They  don't  raise  many  to  start  with." 

"Why  not?" 

"Too  lazy  for  one  thing,  and  then  they  say 
they  have  to  pay  too  much  for  corn." 

"Why  don't  they  raise  their  own  corn?" 

"Don't  ask  me,"  he  answered.  "The  fact  is 
they  buy  western  corn  for  all  their  stock." 

"Won't  corn  grow  here  ?" 

"I  reckon  it  would  grow  if  they  planted  it," 
he  answered.  "Seems  t'  me  I  recollect  some- 
thing about  the  Injuns  growing  it.  But  I 
guess  that  maybe  the  Injuns  didn't  have  to 
plant  theirs.  Maybe  it  just  growed.  I  s'pose 
it's  hard  work  to  plant  corn  and  hoe  it." 

He  laughed  to  himself  at  a  story  this  sug- 
gested. All  these  people  had  Lincoln's  gift  of 
pointing  a  fact  with  a  story. 

"They  tell  about  Josh  Whiting  who  lived  in 
that  old  house  down  to  the  lower  end  of  the 


COLD  FACTS  49 

village  where  Horatio  Sampson  lives  now. 
Josh  was  so  all-fired  lazy  that  he  wouldn't  do 
no  work  at  all  and  like  to  starved  to  death. 
So  the  neighbors  after  feeding  him  for  a  while 
allowed  that  so  long  as  he  waren't  no  good  he 
might  just  as  well  be  buried.  A  committee 
of  'em  went  down  to  his  house  one  day  and  took 
him  out  and  put  him  in  a  hearse  and  started  for 
the  graveyard.  When  they  were  nighing  the 
gate  a  stranger  came  along  and  inquired  what 
was  up.  They  told  him  and  it  seemed  to  him 
like  such  hard  lines  that  he  offered  to  do  some- 
thing. 

:  'I'll  give  the  corpse  a  bag  of  corn  anyhow/ 
says  he. 

"  'All  right/  they  says. 

"So  he  went  to  the  hearse  and  opened  the 
door  and  looked  in. 

;  T  can't  see  a  man  die  for  lack  of  food/ 
says  he.     'So  I'll  give  ye  a  bag  of  corn.' 

"Josh,  he  hitched  up  on  one  elbow  to  see  who 
was  speakin'.  Ts  it  shelled?'  says  he. 

'  'No/  answered  the  fellow.     'But  it  won't 
be  much  trouble  for  you  to  shell  it.' 

"Josh  settled  down  on  his  back  again  with 
his  hands  crossed  over  his  chest.  'Drive  on/ 
he  says." 


50  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Well,"  I  said,  when  I  was  through  laugh- 
ing, "who  gets  what  chickens  they  do  raise?" 

"Dardoni,"  he  answered.  "He  buys  them 
for  cash  and  sends  them  to  the  wholesaler  in 
town.  When  I  want  one  I  buy  from  the  whole- 
saler." 

"What  about  eggs?" 

"Same  thing.  They  bring  in  a  few  to  swap 
for  groceries.  But  look  at  'em." 

He  went  to  a  basket  and  held  up  one  about  as 
large  as  a  robin's  egg. 

"That's  the  kind  they  bring  in,"  he  said. 
"An  egg  is  an  egg  and  I  take  them  'cause  I  can 
sell  them  back  again.  But  when  I  want  a  de- 
cent egg  I  have  to  pay  the  market  quotation 
for  it.  They  all  take  the  papers  and  they 
charge  accordin'  to  what  they  read  there." 

"But  vegetables — " 

"They  don't  raise  enough  for  themselves — 
except  Dardoni  and  a  few  other  Dagoes." 

"What  do  they  raise?"  I  asked. 

"Damfino,"  he  answered.  "Measles  mostly. 
Some  rheumatiz  and  a  fine  crop  of  dyspeptsy. 
You  want  to  know  what  I  make  more  profit  on 
than  anything  in  my  store  ?" 

"What?" 

He  pointed  to  three  shelves  loaded  with  pat- 


COLD  FACTS  51 

ent  medicine  bottles.  "That  stuff,"  he  said. 
"There's  fifty  per  cent,  profit  in  it  and  I  can't 
keep  nuff  of  it." 

"But  good  Lord,  you  wouldn't  think  that  in 
the  country — " 

"They  live  on  it,"  he  answered ;  "what  it  says 
on  the  bottles  is  pretty  nigh  true;  'Babies  cry 
for  it.'  Only  they  oughter  add  onto  that, 
'And  parents  die  for  it.' ' 

He  leaned  over  towards  me  and  spoke  in  my 
ear.  "It  ain't  nothin'  but  dope  and  whisky. 
The  village  is  pretty  nigh  divided  even  on 
which  they  like  best.  I've  got  a  bunch  of  old 
maids  that  get  drunk  reg'lar  on  it  and  don't 
know  it.  The  meanest  thing  I  do  is  to  sell  it  to 
'em." 

"Why  don't  you  cut  it  out?"  I  suggested. 

'  'Cause  they'd  go  to  the  drug  store  and  buy 
it  there,"  he  said.  "If  this  was  the  only  place 
in  town  where  they  could  get  it,  I'd  take  an  ax 
handle  and  smash  every  last  bottle.  That's 
honest.  Howsomever,  that  ain't  got  anything 
to  do  with  eggs,  an'  then  again  maybe  it  has. 
P'raps  it's  that  stuff  that  makes  them  lazy." 

He  turned  to  his  books  again. 

"You  any  idee  how  many  of  these  folks  I 
carry  on  credit  ?" 


52  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Ten  per  cent./'  I  said  for  a  guess. 

"Say  seventy  per  cent,  an'  ye'll  come  nearer. 
Any  idee  how  long  I  carry  most  of  the  ac- 
counts ?" 

"Six  months." 

"They'll  average  up  two  years.  Any  idee 
how  much  of  that  is  bad  ?" 

"Five  per  cent,"  I  said  with  a  laugh. 

"Say  twenty  per  cent,  and  ye  wouldn't  come 
nigh  enough  even  to  hit  the  target." 

I  was  curious  enough  to  examine  his  books 
carefully  and  I  saw  that  every  statement  he 
made  was  true.  I  settled  my  bill  without  an- 
other word. 

"I  don't  see  how  you  keep  in  business,"  I 
said.  "You'll  have  my  trade  from  now  on 
even  though  I  could  do  better  buying  in  town. 
I've  come  out  here  to  live  and  I  believe  in 
standing  my  tax,  but  I'll  be  hanged  if  I  can 
see  any  reason  why  things  should  be  this 
way." 

"After  you've  lived  here  a  year,  maybe  you'll 


see." 


"Maybe  I  will,"  I  said,  "but  I  tell  you  right 
now  that  within  that  time  I'll  be  raising  most 
of  my  own  stuff." 

He  nodded. 


COLD  FACTS  53 

"That's  what  they  all  say.  But  I'd  hate  to 
pay  you  what  that's  goneter  cost  you." 

"What  about  Dardoni?"  I  asked. 

"Oh,  he's  a  Dago,"  answered  Moulton,  as 
though  that  disposed  of  the  question. 

Moulton's  books  had  summed  up  conditions 
in  this  country  town  concretely  and  vividly. 
His  ledger  was  a  tract.  Five  years'  residence 
couldn't  have  given  me  such  a  clear  insight 
into  the  actual  state  of  things  as  they  existed 
here.  But  of  course  they  furnished  no  ex- 
planation either  of  the  apparent  degeneracy  of 
the  natives  or  the  success  of  the  newcomers. 
The  key  to  the  latter  I  held  myself,  but  the  rev- 
elation of  the  condition  of  the  former  came  to 
me  as  a  shock. 

Think  of  it!  Here  almost  within  sight  of 
one  of  the  oldest  and  most  prosperous  cities  in 
the  East  lay  a  village  of  three  or  four  hundred 
American  families,  descendants  of  the  best 
New  England  stock,  in  a  condition  of  such  stag- 
nation that  they  couldn't  pay  their  store  bills. 
Surrounded  by  land  which  had  supported  their 
ancestors,  they  were  dependent  upon  the  West 
for  their  food  stuffs.  Born  and  bred  in  the 
open  air  they  were  weak  and  lazy  and  sick.  In 
ideal  surroundings  my  own  kith  and  kin  were 


54  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

actually  worse  off  than  many  of  the  penniless 
immigrants  of  the  slums. 

What,  in  God's  name,  was  the  matter  with 
them?  I  asked  this  of  myself  over  and  over 
again  and  that  winter,  as  I  learned  still  more 
about  them,  what  had  at  first  been  merely  an 
exclamation  of  surprise  became  a  prayer. 
What,  in  God's  name,  was  the  matter  with 
them? 


CHAPTER    IV, 

A   TOWN    ASLEEP 

During  this  first  winter  Ruth  and  I  made 
the  most  of  every  opportunity  to  get  acquainted 
with  our  fellow  townsmen.  We  went  to 
church  regularly  and  attended  all  the  sociables 
and  concerts  and  fairs  and  we  met  some  very 
fine  people.  But  a  large  part  of  them  however, 
were  not  so  representative  of  the  new  gener- 
ation in  whom  I  was  most  interested  as  they 
were  of  the  old  generation.  I  found  that  most 
of  the  comfortable  and  well-to-do  were  among 
those  who  had  inherited  small  fortunes,  where 
the  accumulations  of  several  branches  of  one 
family  had  finally  settled  in  a  single  individual. 
Much  of  this  money  I  also  found  had  been 
made  outside  the  village.  Then  of  course 
there  was  another  prosperous  element  consist- 
ing of  a  half  dozen  local  business  men  who 
were  doing  well;  the  hardware  merchant,  the 
druggist,  the  grain  and  hay  merchant,  the 
local  lawyers  and  doctors.  I  might  have  seen 

55 


56  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

more  of  these  men  if  I  had  been  a  member  of 
the  fraternal  organizations,  but  somehow  I 
never  took  to  them.  I  found  that  there  were  a 
half  dozen  branches  of  various  secret  societies 
in  this  small  village  and  a  good  many  men  be- 
longed to  them  all. 

Another  significant  fact  was  that  I  didn't 
meet  at  any  of  these  gatherings  any  of  my  for- 
eign-born friends.  I  never  saw  Dardoni 
there,  or  Tony  or  any  of  the  other  dozen  fam- 
ilies who  as  far  as  enterprise  and  worldly  suc- 
cess go  were  important  members  of  the  com- 
munity. One  reason  was  their  difference  in 
religious  belief,  but  another  and  stronger  was 
the  fact  that  they  were  held  to  be  on  an  in- 
ferior social  plane.  In  many  ways  they  were. 
There's  no  denying  this,  but  they  had,  to  my 
mind,  enough  sterling  qualities  to  offset  that. 
Anyway,  I  hadn't  looked  to  find  social  lines 
drawn  in  a  country  village,  but  when  I  ex- 
pressed my  views  even  to  Cunningham,  the 
minister,  I  didn't  receive  much  encouragement. 
It  made  me  mad  to  see  such  snobbishness  in  an 
American  village  and  several  times  I  spoke 
from  the  shoulder.  After  I  had  visited  Dar- 
doni's  farm  I  felt  more  strongly  than  ever. 

Signer  Dardoni  had  some  forty  acres  and 


A  TOWN  ASLEEP  57 

there  wasn't  a  square  foot  which  wasn't  under 
cultivation.  Ten  of  them  were  in  an  apple 
orchard — the  only  orchard  in  town  that  pro- 
duced commercially.  He  had  taken  native 
trees  when  they  weren't  more  than  half  alive 
with  their  clutter  of  dead  limbs,  and  trimmed 
them  up,  grafted  them,  and  made  them  pay. 
That  one  accomplishment  alone  ought  to  have 
distinguished  him  in  the  village.  It  ought  to 
have  set  an  example  if  nothing  else.  And  yet 
I  found  orchard  after  orchard  going  to  waste 
and  producing  nothing  but  cider  apples.  Even 
these  weren't  picked,  and  Dardoni  made  an- 
other neat  income  every  fall  buying  them  on 
the  trees  for  a  song  and  turning  them  into  new 
cider  and  vinegar.  He  had  done  this  for  five 
years  and  everyone  knew  that  it  paid  and  yet 
no  one  thought  of  following  his  example  and 
making  the  same  use  of  their  own  waste  apples. 
That's  a  fair  illustration  of  the  difference  in 
spirit  between  the  two  races. 

Another  ten  or  fifteen  acres  he  kept  for  hay, 
raising  enough  for  his  own  use  and  sometimes 
enough  to  sell.  On  another  strip  he  raised  his 
own  corn  and  wheat  for  fodder,  being  the  only 
man  in  town  who  didn't  spend  his  good  money 
at  the  hay  and  grain  store  where  corn  went  at 


58  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

times  way  over  the  dollar  mark.  Here  again 
the  natives  had  a  working  example  before  their 
very  eyes  and  yet  took  no  advantage  of  it. 

Another  ten  acres  Dardoni  devoted  to 
garden  truck  for  the  near-by  market,  reaping 
every  spring  a  handsome  profit.  There  wasn't 
a  native  in  the  whole  village  who  tried  even  to 
raise  more  than  enough  for  himself  and  many 
didn't  do  that  even  when  they  had  back  door 
yards  big  enough  to  supply  them  for  the  year. 

The  rest  of  his  land  he  used  for  his  chicken 
and  egg  business,  although  he  had  some  fifty 
pigs  which  ran  loose  most  everywhere.  Of 
course  he  also  kept  cows — a  half  dozen  of  them, 
selling  the  cream  to  the  local  creamery  (which, 
incidentally,  was  not  owned  by  local  capital) 
and  using  the  buttermilk  for  his  pigs  and  chick- 
ens. The  pigs  kept  his  orchard  in  good  con- 
dition and  the  cows  and  horses  furnished  him 
with  dressing  for  his  other  land. 

Now  I  want  to  make  a  point  here:  Dardoni 
was  not  a  scientific  farmer.  He  didn't  know 
anything  about  the  science  of  farming.  He 
was  not  reviving  worn-out  soil  by  the  use  of 
modern  cultivation.  He  was  not  applying 
laboratory  methods;  he  was  applying  horse 
sense.  He  didn't  know  any  more  about  farm- 


A  TOWN  ASLEEP  59 

ing,  or  as  much  perhaps,  as  every  mother's  son 
of  those  who  had  been  born  and  brought  up 
here  and  their  fathers  before  them.  But  he 
did  know  enough  to  work  his  land  and  he  had 
learned  to  do  that  in  a  country  where  a  single 
acre  means  something.  The  only  difference 
between  him  and  these  others  was  that  he  got 
up  early  in  the  morning  and  worked — worked 
all  day  long.  The  one  thing  in  his  favor  was 
that  he  also  had  a  business  instinct  and  appre- 
ciated the  value  of  his  city  market.  But  prin- 
cipally his  success  lay  in  the  fact  that  he  used 
every  single  advantage  and  made  the  most  of 
it. 

He  lived  in  a  large  old-fashioned  Colonial 
house  which  had  once  been  owned  by  a  local 
politician  who  had  succeeded  in  being  elected  to 
Congress  for  a  single  term  in  Civil  War  days, 
and  who  had  never  found  it  necessary  to  do 
anything  afterwards.  His  son  dissipated  his 
fortune  and  the  place  came  on  the  market  about 
the  time  Dardoni  happened  along.  Dardoni 
hadn't  improved  its  appearance  any  but  he  had 
added  a  big  barn  and  several  out  houses.  His 
family  consisted  of  a  wife  and  six  children, 
the  oldest  being  Lucia  who  was  eighteen  and 
who  had  been  educated  at  the  local  high  school, 


60  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

and  the  youngest  being  Joe,  now  three  years 
old.  The  rest  of  his  household  included  a  half 
dozen  young  men,  all  relatives,  to  whom  he 
paid  an  average  of  ten  dollars  a  week.  They 
were  good  workers  and  seldom  remained  with 
him  longer  than  three  years  before  buying  a 
place  of  their  own.  Through  him,  directly 
and  indirectly,  some  forty  families  had  already 
settled  in  the  village. 

Personally  I  found  Dardoni  a  most  interest- 
ing and  agreeable  fellow,  and  the  more  I  saw 
him  the  better  I  liked  him.  He  had  become 
thoroughly  Americanized  in  the  sense  that  he 
had  really  made  America  his  home  with  the 
expectation  of  spending  his  life  here  and  hav- 
ing his  sons  and  daughters  live  here  after  him. 
He  had  been  naturalized  and  was  a  heavy  tax- 
payer but  he  took  no  interest  in  the  affairs  of 
the  town.  For  one  thing  his  home  was  his 
castle  and  for  another  his  habit  of  thought 
was  to  accept  conditions  as  they  were  and 
make  the  best  of  them  without  any  attempt  to 
change  them.  But  whenever  I  suggested  any 
needed  improvement,  such  as  in  the  matter  of 
better  roads,  I  found  him  alive  and  willing  to 
do  his  share. 

One  other  incident  that  winter  set  me  to 


A  TOWN  ASLEEP  61 

thinking  and  made  me  feel  more  than  ever  the 
need  of  some  radical  revolution  in  this  old 
town.  Hadley  came  to  me  in  January  and 
wanted  to  borrow  fifty  dollars. 

"Show  me  that  you  really  need  it  and  I'll  let 
you  have  it,"  I  said. 

"I've  got  a  note  comin'  due,"  he  answered. 

"Who  holds  it?"  I  asked. 

"Dardoni,"  he  answered. 

"What  did  you  borrow  from  him  for?"  I 
asked. 

"Well,  there  was  considerable  sickness  in  the 
family  last  year  and  I  got  hard  up." 

"You  own  your  house  all  clear?" 

"Yes — except  that  Dardoni  took  a  first  mort- 
gage on  it  for  the  note." 

"And  you  have  five  acres  of  land?" 

"Yes." 

"And  there's  only  you  and  your  wife?" 

"Yes." 

"Then  how—" 

"Doctors  and  medicines  cost  something,"  he 
broke  in,  rather  resenting  my  further  question- 
ing. 

Now  here  was  a  concrete  example  of  a  man 
without  any  bad  habits  in  the  ordinary  mean- 
ing of  the  word,  who  had  lived  here  fifty  years 


62  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

in  a  house  and  on  land  which  came  to  him  by 
inheritance,  who  had  worked  with  a  fair 
amount  of  industry  and  raised  three  children, 
all  now  away  from  home  and  self  supporting, 
who  in  a  crisis  had  been  forced  to  borrow 
money  from  an  immigrant  who  hadn't  been  in 
this  country  ten  years  and  who  started  without 
a  cent.  On  the  face  of  it  there  was  something 
wrong  here,  but  what  was  it?  In  a  nutshell, 
lack  of  thrift,  lack  of  industry,  lack  of  enter- 
prise. Hadley  was  doing  here  on  a  farm  ex- 
actly what  I  had  done  in  the  suburbs;  he  was 
living  and  always  had  lived  up  to  the  last  cent 
he  made.  Even  at  this  time,  when  he  was  ear- 
ning forty  dollars  a  month  from  me,  he  didn't 
save  a  cent.  He  bought  hay  and  corn  for  his 
horse ;  he  bought  expensive  meats  for  his  table ; 
instead  of  mending  old  harnesses,  he  bought 
new  harnesses ;  he  subscribed  for  a  daily  paper 
and  had  a  telephone  in  his  house  which  he  didn't 
need  any  more  than  he  needed  a  safe  deposit 
vault.  In  the  meanwhile  he  had  five  acres  of 
idle  land  at  his  back.  He  was  in  a  state  of 
lethargy  as  the  whole  town  was  in  a  state 
of  lethargy.  He  was  stagnant — half-dead.  A 
dozen  things  which  had  been  luxuries  to  his 
father  had  become  necessities  to  him.  The 


A  TOWN  ASLEEP  63 

price  of  everything  had  increased  and  he  hadn't 
kept  pace  with  it.  What  was  true  of  him  was 
true  of  the  whole  town.  I  loaned  him  the 
money  but  that  night  I  had  a  talk  with  Ruth. 

"Ruth,"  I  said,  "I'm  going  to  give  this  old 
town  the  biggest  shaking  up  it's  had  since  the 
glacial  period." 

"Why,  Billy,  what's  the  matter?"  she  asked. 

"Everything's  the  matter,"  I  said.  "This 
village  isn't  sleeping,  but  dead.  It's  time 
someone  blew  the  resurrection  trumpet.  I'm 
going  to  blow  it ;  I'm  going  to  play  Gabriel." 

She  looked  up  from  her  sewing  with  a  laugh, 
but  when  she  saw  I  was  in  earnest  she  put  aside 
her  work  and  came  over  and  put  her  arms 
around  me. 


CHAPTER  V 

STIRRING   THINGS   UP 

I  meant  every  word  I  said  and  I  set  to  work 
right  off.  One  of  the  first  things  I  did  was  to 
have  the  Reverend  Percy  Cunningham  up  to 
supper.  His  church  was  probably  the  biggest 
social  influence  in  the  village  and  so  if  it  was 
possible  I  wanted  to  enlist  him  at  the  begin- 
ning. Personally  I  didn't  think  much  of  his 
ability.  He  was  a  serious  man  who  acted  as 
though  he  thought  his  chief  function  here  was 
the  conducting  of  funerals.  The  very  sight  of 
him  was  a  grim  reminder  of  death.  He 
dressed  in  black,  seldom  smiled,  and  he  walked 
on  tiptoe.  His  appearance  was  all  the  more 
marked  because  it  happened  that  Seavey,  the 
local  undertaker,  was  a  roly-poly,  good-natured 
man  and  the  biggest  sport  in  town.  He  owned 
an  automobile,  drank  more  than  was  good  for 
him,  and  acted  as  starter  at  all  the  horse  races 
within  a  radius  of  fifty  miles.  Perhaps  it  was 
to  offset  this  blithe  influence  of  his  colleague 

64 


STIRRING  THINGS  UP  65 

that  Cunningham  felt  it  necessary  to  go  to  the 
other  extreme.  At  any  rate  Ruth  said  that 
whenever  he  called  in  the  afternoon  she  felt 
as  though  she  ought  to  darken  the  room  and 
send  the  children  off  to  a  neighbor. 

We  had  him  up  and  Ruth  laid  herself  out  to 
make  the  meal  as  cheerful  as  possible,  but  when 
we  were  through  I  felt  like  saying  Amen. 
Ruth  spoke  of  it  later  as  the  Last  Supper  and 
was  ashamed  of  herself  afterwards. 

I  took  him  into  the  front  room  and  began  on 
him  at  once. 

"Mr.  Cunningham,"  I  said,  "it  seems  to  me 
the  time  has  come  for  this  town  to  take  out  a 
new  lease  on  life." 

"To  be  sure,"  he  agreed. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "you've  been  here  longer  than 
I  have;  what's  your  suggestion  for  bringing 
this  about?" 

He  thought  a  moment  and  then  he  said,  "I've 
been  seriously  considering  your  suggestion  for 
a  very  long  while — in  fact  ever  since  I  took  up 
my  pastoral  work  here." 

"That  was  about  fifteen  years  ago?"  I  in- 
quired. 

"Sixteen  years  this  coming  spring,"  he  an- 
swered. 


66  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"You  ought  to  have  reached  some  conclusion 
in  that  time,"  I  said. 

"To  be  sure/'  he  nodded.  "What  I  thought 
I  should  do  when  I  saw  my  opportunity  was  to 
invite  here  two  or  three  good  evangelists  and 
hold  a  rousing  week  of  revival  services." 

Now  I  have  no  objection  to  revival  services. 
In  their  way  they  do  good.  But  after  all,  their 
function  is  largely  religious  and  I  had  in  mind 
just  at  present  something  more  material.  Be- 
sides, the  revival  end  seemed  to  me  to  be  his 
own  duty.  He  himself  ought  to  have  been 
holding  meetings  all  these  last  sixteen  years. 

"That's  all  right,"  I  said.  "I  guess  we  need 
something  of  the  sort.  But  to  get  down  to 
brass  tacks,  have  you  any  idea  how  many  peo- 
ple in  this  town  are  in  debt?" 

"No,"  he  said,  "I  have  never  looked  into 
that." 

"About  half  of  them,"  I  said.  "Have  you 
any  idea  how  many  of  the  men  and  women  in 
this  town  are  drunkards?" 

"Women — drunkards?"  he  exclaimed. 

"About  a  third  of  them,"  I  said. 

"Mr.  Carleton,  you  must  be  mistaken !" 

"Ask  your  druggist;  ask  Moulton!"  I  said. 
"They'll  tell  you.  Most  of  the  children  are 


STIRRING  THINGS  UP  67 

either  doped  or  stimulated  with  patent  medi- 
cines. Besides  this,  there  are  a  dozen  or  two 
downright  morphine  fiends.  Dr.  Wentworth 
is  responsible  for  that." 

"Dr.  Wentworth !"  he  exclaimed.  "That  is 
a  very  serious  charge,  Mr.  Carleton.  Dr. 
Wentworth  has  been  practicing  here  for  al- 
most forty  years." 

"More's  the  pity,"  I  said.  "He  belongs 
back  in  the  dark  ages.  I  went  to  him  myself 
with  a  touch  of  neuralgia  and  he  prescribed 
morphine  before  I'd  been  in  his  office  fifteen 
minutes.  It's  become  a  habit  with  him  just  be- 
cause it's  the  simplest  way  of  relieving  pain. 
However,  those  are  details.  They  don't  ac- 
count for  the  general  lethargy,  for  the  decay- 
ing orchards,  for  the  waste  land  and  wasted 
opportunities  which  are  lying  all  around  your 
parish.  Now,  to  take  another  tack  for  a  mo- 
ment— did  it  ever  strike  you  as  significant  that 
every  foreign-born  settler  who  has  come  here 
during  the  last  ten  years  is  waxing  fat  and 
prosperous?" 

"I've  seen  very  little  of  the  foreign  element," 
he  said. 

"Why?" 

He  smiled  weakly. 


68  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

''They  are.  hardly  of  us,"  he  said,  "either  in 
faith  or  standards.  It  has  always  seemed  to 
me  a  pity  that  they  should  have  found  their 
way  here." 

I  became  heated  at  that. 

"Pity!"  I  exclaimed.  "It's  the  one  ray  of 
hope  in  this  whole  blessed  village.  They  came 
here  and  are  coming  here  with  the  -old-time 
spirit  of  the  men  who  founded  this  town. 
They  are  adventurers — pioneers.  They  come 
here  fresh,  eager,  earnest,  with  simple  tastes 
and  simple  standards.  They  are  making  good 
and  they  are  going  to  continue  to  make  good 
until — mark  my  words — they  own  not  only  this 
town  but  all  New  England." 

He  sat  up  at  this. 

"It's  a  fact,"  I  said.  "Look  around  you. 
It's  clear  as  daylight.  On  the  one  hand  we 
have  the  old  stock,  either  abandoning  their 
farms  or  dying  upon  them;  on  the  other  we 
have  the  newcomers  pressing  in  with  the  eager- 
ness of  explorers,  taking  up  these  farms  and 
bringing  them  to  life.  Why,  this  is  Eden  to 
them.  Where  they  came  from  they've  been 
making  a  living  off  bits  of  soil  that  we  wouldn't 
build  a  pigsty  on,  and  here  they  have  acres 
for  the  asking.  Look  at  Dardoni;  look  at 


STIRRING  THINGS  UP  69 

Tony;  look  at  the  dozen  others.  They  are  set- 
tling this  country  anew  in  exactly  the  same 
spirit  that  our  ancestors  did.  And  they  are 
going  to  win  in  the  same  fashion.  They  are 
going  to  drive  these  shiftless  remnants  before 
them  exactly  as  our  forefathers  drove  off  the 
Indians.  We  think  Columbus  discovered  this 
country  in  1492  once  for  all,  when  it's  really 
being  discovered  now  before  our  face  and  eyes. 
We  think  this  country  was  settled  by  the  Pil- 
grims, when  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  real  settling 
is  going  on  to-day." 

I  didn't  intend  to  orate  but  as  I  sat  facing 
Cunningham  I  felt  as  though  I  were  facing  the 
\vhole  village.  With  his  black  clothes,  his 
drooping  shoulders,  and  his  fifteen  years  of  de- 
liberation, he  represented  just  the  element  I 
wanted  to  get  at.  But  I  didn't  rouse  him  very 
much.  He  murmured  something  about  being 
surprised  and  I  ran  on  still  further. 

"Now,"  I  said,  "what  are  we  going  to  do 
about  it?  Most  of  the  younger  generation 
are  moving  away  as  fast  as  they  are  old 
enough.  They  are  either  going  into  the  cities 
or  out  West.  I  don't  blame  them  for  that. 
It's  encouraging  to  think  they  have  life  enough 
left  in  'em  to  crawl  out  of  this  frog  pond. 


70  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Those  who  don't  emigrate  are  as  old  and 
feeble  at  seventeen  as  their  grandfathers  were 
at  seventy.  What  are  we  going  to  do  about 
it?" 

"Really,  Mr.  Carleton,  I— I  don't  know." 

"Then  let  me  give  you  my  idea :  let's  all  emi- 
grate." 

He  evidently  thought  I  was  crazy. 

"I  mean  it,"  I  said.  "And  I  know  what  I'm 
talking  about  because  I've  already  done  it  once. 
Let's  emigrate  out  of  the  past  into  the  present. 
Let's  emigrate  to  new  New  England.  Let's 
start  a  pioneer  movement  and  tackle  these  old 
acres  as  though  they  were  virgin  soil.  Let's 
join  Dardoni  and  his  fellows." 

"You  don't  mean  literally,  Mr.  Carleton?" 

"Why  not?" 

"Wouldn't  that  be — to  speak  frankly — a  lit- 
tle bit  like  going  backwards  ?" 

"  If  you  like,"  I  said.  "But  it  wouldn't  hurt 
this  town  any  to  go  back  a  hundred  years  or 
so.  The  curse  comes  in  standing  still." 

"Well,"  he  said,  preparing  to  leave,  "your 
suggestion  is  interesting — very.  I  most  cer- 
tainly will  think  it  over." 

Remembering  how  long  it  took  him  to  think 


STIRRING  THINGS  UP  71 

over  things  before,  that  didn't  sound  very  en- 
couraging. 

"All  right,"  I  said,  "and  in  the  meanwhile 
I'm  going  to  start  something." 


CHAPTER  VI 

A   GAME   WORTH    PLAYING 

The  pioneer  idea — that  was  the  heart  of  my 
scheme;  the  same  old  idea  that  had  already 
lifted  me  from  the  slough  of  a  salary  and  the 
suburbs  and  put  me  on  my  feet.  Under  its 
inspiration  I  had  worked  out  my  salvation  in 
the  city  and  now,  although  I  had  come  here  for 
peace  and  quiet,  I  felt  as  though  I  were  being 
challenged  by  a  cuff  on  the  cheek.  No  live 
man  could  sit  down  and  look  on  calmly  at  such 
conditions  as  faced  me  here.  When  these 
people  within  sight  of  a  hungry  market  said 
that  farming  didn't  pay  it  proved  that  the 
fundamental  trouble  was  not  lack  of  oppor- 
tunity but  lack  of  appreciation  of  the 
opportunity.  Just  sit  down  and  figure  out 
what  the  forebears  of  these  same  people  ac- 
complished on  these  very  acres.  Out  of  this 
soil  they  wrenched  the  capital  that  went  far 
towards  establishing  the  richest  nation  on  the 
face  of  the  earth.  But  it  may  be  argued  that 

72 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          73 

the  Pilgrims  had  the  advantage  of  virgin  land. 
So  they  did,  but  virgin  land  in  New  England 
meant  also  virgin  rocks — a  million  or  more  to 
the  acre  as  testified  to  by  the  stone  walls  of  to- 
day; it  meant  virgin  trees  with  a  wild  tangle 
of  roots  and  no  dynamite  to  blow  them  out 
with ;  it  meant  virgin  cold  and  the  crudest  kind 
of  stoves  to  fight  it  off  with ;  it  meant  crude  vir- 
gin farm  implements  and  virgin  Indians  to 
make  the  use  of  them  interesting  by  zipping 
arrows  from  ambush  at  the  sturdy  plowman. 
And  yet  in  spite  of  these  handicaps  and  a  hun- 
dred others,  those  same  pioneers  fought  it  out 
with  such  fine  spirit  that  there  are  to-day  men 
who  sigh  because  they  were  not  living  then  in- 
stead of  now.  They  won  a  comfortable  living 
and  so  did  their  sons  and  grandsons  after  them, 
even  though  they  were  forced  to  sacrifice  half 
their  time  and  money  and  life  in  battle  to  es- 
tablish this  nation  wrhich  now  we  enjoy  already 
established.  And  they  did  this  because  of  the 
pioneer  spirit  back  of  them — a  spirit  which  a 
nation  allows  to  die  at  its  peril. 

With  all  I  saw  before  me  I  didn't  believe 
that  spirit  was  yet  dead.  As  Ruth  said,  there 
wasn't  a  youngster  in  this  very  village,  who 
though  he  wasn't  worth  his  salt  here,  wouldn't 


74  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

buck  up  if  placed  on  a  Western  homestead  a 
hundred  miles  or  more  from  civilization.  The 
spirit  of  his  ancestors  would  then  rouse  him. 
They  were  proving  it  by  taking  up  farms  in 
Canada.  In  a  less  marked  degree  it  was  this 
same  spirit  which  without  their  knowledge 
prompted  them  to  do  better  in  the  cities  at  the 
beginning  than  at  home.  The  thing  then,  to 
my  mind,  which  was  needed  was  to  make  these 
same  young  men  realize  that  it  was  really  just 
as  much  of  a  brave  adventure  to  make  a  few 
acres  pay  in  the  East  as  in  the  West.  That 
was  what  I  had  got  hold  of  when  standing 
helpless  without  the  capital  to  go  West.  I 
assumed  that  I  had  already  traveled  a  thou- 
sand miles  to  get  where  I  already  was  and 
from  that  point  didn't  go  ten  miles  from  home. 
Now  it  was  this  spirit  of  a  young  nation 
which  the  foreign-born  caught.  In  the  older 
country  where  it  was  dead  I  haven't  much 
doubt  but  what  Dardoni  and  his  fellows  were 
a  shiftless  lot.  If  they  had  remained  they 
would  probably  have  plugged  along  in  a  beg- 
garly rut.  It  wasn't  until  they  came  over 
here  that  they  roused  themselves  to  work,  not 
ploddingly  like  uninspired  natives,  but  with  a 
romantic  fervor  that  made  these  old  acres  yield 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          75 

as  they  had  never  yielded  before.  They 
brought  with  them  no  modern  agricultural 
methods.  They  took  the  land  as  they  found  it, 
and  it  was  their  simple  pioneer  standards,  their 
pioneer  earnestness,  their  pioneer  courage,  that 
brought  them  success.  They  worked  for  inde- 
pendence with  the  same  pioneer  enthusiasm 
and  industry  which  inspired  the  early  settlers. 
How  long  would  that  little  band  of  adventur- 
ers who  landed  on  the  rocky  shore  of  Massa- 
chusetts have  lasted  if  they  had  shown  no  more 
backbone  than  those  who  to-day  fold  their 
hands  and  shake  their  heads  at  the  deserted 
farms  surrounding  them  ? 

The  more  I  talked  over  these  things  with 
Ruth  the  more  excited  I  became.  It  was  as 
clear  as  daylight  that  idle  land  could  not  for- 
ever exist  in  the  face  of  a  needy  market.  I 
had  learned  at  school  the  phrase  that  ''Nature 
abhors  a  vacuum."  Rural  New  England  to- 
day was  practically  a  vacuum  and  nature  was 
already  finding  a  way  to  fill  it.  She  was  for- 
cing in  adventurers  of  other  nations  with  the 
challenge  to  the  native  born  to  either  get  to 
work  or  get  out.  If  anyone  wants  to  see  proof 
of  this  for  himself  let  him  travel  through  the 


76  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Connecticut  valley,  or  along  the  Massachusetts 
cape,  or  through  the  small  towns  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  Boston.  Let  him  go  into  the  hill 
towns  of  Maine,  New  Hampshire,  Vermont, 
New  York,  and  he  will  find  there  Italians, 
Portuguese,  Russians,  Poles,  already  estab- 
lished and  accepted  where  twenty  years  ago 
a  foreigner  was  a  curiosity.  They  are  the 
vanguard  of  the  army  Nature  is  marshaling 
for  her  certain  purpose.  Let  the  traveler  look 
below  the  superficial  squalor  and  learn  how 
many  people  these  pioneers  are  supporting, 
how  much  they  are  saving  and  how  much  they 
are  buying,  and  he  will  catch  an  inkling  of 
what's  afoot.  I  had  seen  this  going  on  in  the 
city,  but  there  the  contrast  between  what  was 
and  what  is  was  not  so  marked.  New  Eng- 
land cities  have  long  ceased  to  be  merely 
New  England,  and  I  had  come  out  into  the 
country  for  that  very  reason.  I  had  wanted 
a  taste  of  undiluted  New  England,  and  this 
was  what  I  found. 

In  the  meanwhile  Dick  had  been  taking  hold 
of  the  contracting  business  with  such  good  re- 
sults that  I  found  myself  able  to  throw  more 
and  more  upon  him.  He  had  with  him  a  col- 
lege mate,  and  the  two  under  the  spur  of  youth 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          77 

went  hustling  after  new  business  at  a  pace  that 
made  my  services  unnecessary  except  as  a  sort 
of  advisory  committee.  With  my  new  inter- 
ests to  occupy  me,  with  the  business  prosper- 
ing under  the  younger  management  and  with 
a  fair  amount  in  the  bank  as  a  surety  against 
accidents,  I  was  glad  to  have  it  so.  I  believe 
it's  an  older  man's  duty  to  turn  over  his  busi- 
ness to  the  younger  generation  whenever  it  is 
possible.  During  the  winter  I  watched  the 
progress  of  the  two  boys  closely  and  was  sur- 
prised at  the  shrewdness  and  level  headedness 
that  Dick  displayed.  I  give  credit  for  that  to 
his  experience  in  selling  newspapers  on  the 
streets.  It  taught  him  not  only  self-reliance 
but  in  his  association  with  men  both  self-con- 
fidence and  poise.  He  knew  how  to  approach 
men,  how  to  put  forward  his  case  in  the  short- 
est possible  time,  and  then  how  and  when  to 
leave.  He  was  popular  too  with  the  gang  and 
I  found  the  latter  turning  more  and  more  to 
him. 

It  was  in  February  that  after  a  long  talk 
with  Ruth  I  called  the  boy  into  my  den  one 
evening. 

"Dick,"  I  said,  "I  haven't  been  very  much 
more  than  a  figurehead  in  the  business  during 


;8  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

the  last  few  months  and  now  I  think  I'll  pull 
out  altogether." 

"For  Heaven's  sake,  Dad,"  he  answered, 
"what's  the  matter  with  you  ?" 

"Nothing,"  I  said.  "Only  you  don't  need 
me  and  I  want  to  take  up  farming." 

"You'd  better  let  me  call  in  the  doc,"  he  an- 
swered. 

"Do  I  look  as  though  I  needed  him?"  said 
I.  "It's  sure  that  if  I  felt  that  way  I  wouldn't 
be  undertaking  a  new  business." 

"It's  all  right  for  you  to  putter  around  here 
for  fun,"  he  said,  "but  you  know  as  well  as  I 
that  you  can't  make  farming  pay.  Just  look 
around  you — " 

"That's  what  makes  me  believe  farming  will 
pay,"  I  said.  "I  look  around  me  and  I  see  men 
doing  just  what  you  advise  me  to  do — putter- 
ing around.  You  wouldn't  expect  to  make 
contracting  pay  if  you  went  at  it  that  way, 
would  you  ?" 

"I  know,  but—" 

"Look  here,"  I  broke  in,  glad  of  a  chance  to 
express  some  of  the  things  I  had  been  thinking 
over  for  the  last  few  months.  "Look  here, 
boy,  do  you  realize  what  as  a  business  propo- 
sition this  village  is  ?  It's  a  big  unused  plant 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          79 

in  which  thousands  of  dollars  have  been  in- 
vested, and  it's  lying  idle  next  door  to  a  mar- 
ket crying  for  its  products.  If  you  saw  a  big 
factory  building  all  equipped  and  standing 
idle,  with  labor  loafing  around  the  doors,  with 
its  books  filled  with  orders,  you'd  jump  in, 
wouldn't  you?  Well,  that's  exactly  what  this 
village  is.  Small  as  it  is,  you've  only  to  look 
at  the  assessor's  books  to  find  that  over  a  mil- 
lion dollars  is  invested  here  in  lands  and  an- 
other half  million  in  buildings.  There  are 
over  eight  hundred  voters  in  town  and  not  a 
hundred  of  them  are  making  more  than  a  bare 
living  out  of  this  investment.  It's  safe  to  say 
that  not  a  quarter  of  one  per  cent,  is  being 
made  on  this  big  capital.  And  yet  within  a 
team  drive  of  us  there's  a  market  so  large  that 
it's  bringing  its  produce  at  a  profit  some  three 
thousand  miles.  It's  not  only  bringing  it 
there,  but  it's  bringing  it  into  this  very  town." 

"But  look  here,  Dad,"  Dick  interrupted, 
"you  don't  own  the  town,  you  know." 

"But  I  own  part  of  it,"  I  said,  "and  I  intend 
to  help  operate  the  rest." 

"I  don't  know  how,"  he  said.  "Besides  it's 
been  tried  and  the  business  hasn't  paid." 

"What  about  Dardoni?"  I  asked. 


80  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"That's  so." 

"I'm  not  going  to  undertake  anything  that 
isn't  being  done  to-day  right  under  our  noses. 
It's  as  true  as  gospel  preaching  that  these  old 
world  pioneers  are  going  to  own  this  village 
and  utilize  to  the  fullest  these  opportunities 
unless  we  do  ourselves.  What  is  true  here  is 
true  of  all  New  England.  That  isn't  a  cry 
of  wolf  when  there  is  no  wolf,  either;  it's  the 
sober  truth.  These  fellows  are  going  at  their 
work  right.  It  isn't  luck  with  them.  You 
can't  say  that  New  York  is  owned  by  Jews 
because  Hebrews  are  a-  lucky  race.  They  are 
the  unluckiest  race  on  the  face  of  the  earth. 
They  own  New  York  because  they  are  a  pio- 
neer race.  And  because  of  this  they  are  going 
to  own  more  than  New  York  if  we  Americans 
don't  wake  up." 

"By  George,  you're  right,  Dad,"  exclaimed 
Dick.  "What  is  more,  they  deserve  all  they 
get.  They've  worked  and  sacrificed  for  every 
cent  of  it." 

"Exactly  as  our  ancestors  did  when  they 
were  adventurers  in  a  new  land,"  I  said.  "It 
gets  back  again  to  the  pioneer  idea.  This 
country  with  its  institutions  no  longer  belongs 
to  the  people  who  made  it.  It's  being  made  all 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          81 

over  again  and  it  belongs  to  those  who  are  help- 
ing in  the  new  making." 

"Right!  Right!  But  what  you  want  to  do 
is  to  get  out  and  preach  this.  You've  worked 
hard,  Dad,  and  it's  time  you  had  a  rest." 

"There's  been  preaching  enough,  Dick,"  I 
said,  "and  as  for  rest — a  man  doesn't  rest  at 
my  age  by  doing  nothing." 

"Then  what's  your  scheme?" 

"To  make  my  own  farm  pay  and  then  to  help 
my  neighbors  make  their  farms  pay." 

"I'll  stake  my  last  dollar  that  you  make  your 
own  pay  if  you  start  in  to  do  it,  but  as  for  the 
others — have  you  thought  out  any  plan  ?" 

"In  a  rough  way,"  I  said.  "In  the  first  place 
I'm  convinced  that  talk  doesn't  do  any  good. 
These  people  have  been  preached  at  through 
the  papers,  magazines  and  pulpit  until  their 
brains  are  calloused.  They  aren't  interested 
in  the  problem  in  the  abstract.  They  aren't 
interested  in  anything  much — not  even  them- 
selves. They're  convinced  that  farming 
doesn't  pay  and  they  have  before  them  the 
visible  proof  that  it  doesn't  so  far  as  they  are 
concerned  anyhow.  On  the  other  hand,  there's 
Dardoni,  but  they  dispose  of  him  by  calling 
him  a  Dago." 


82  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Then  what's  left?"  demanded  Dick. 

"To  get  them  interested  in  themselves  first 
of  all.  The  only  way  I  know  of  to  do  that  is 
to  make  it  worth  their  while  in  good  hard 
cash." 

"Bribe  'em?" 

"It  amounts  to  that.  I  want  to  get  them  to- 
gether in  some  sort  of  an  organization.'' 

"There's  the  Grange,"  said  Dick. 

"It  has  played  its  part  and  in  some  places  is 
still  playing  it.  But  around  here  people  are 
sick  of  it.  It  has  become  nothing  but  a  social 
club." 

"Well?" 

"You  know  what  they  are  doing  in  the  West 
and  South;  they  are  offering  cash  prizes  to 
boys  for  the  best  crop  of  corn  raised  on  a  given 
area.  They've  roused  the  whole  country  to  the 
competition  and  have  advertised  it  so  well  that 
the  winner  becomes  for  the  moment  a  national 
figure.  That's  what  we  ought  to  do  here,  only 
my  plan  is  to  give  the  competition  a  wider 
scope.  We  ought  to  have  prizes  for  the  older 
men  and  for  the  women.  We  ought  to  stimu- 
late better  care  of  our  apple  orchards,  better 
hay  fields,  better  potatoes,  better  household 
economy,  better  kitchen  gardens." 


A  GAME  WORTH  PLAYING          83 

"Hold  on,"  interrupted  Dick,  "who's  going 
to  pay  for  these  prizes  ?" 

"In  the  end  the  club  will  raise  the  money. 
To  start  with  it  ought  to  be  raised  by  public 
subscription." 

"If  I  know  this  crowd,  you've  got  a  job." 

"Ten  prizes  of  a  hundred  dollars  each  will 
amount  to  only  a  thousand  dollars.  The  busi- 
ness men  of  the  town  ought  to  give  half  that 
the  first  year;  I'll  give  the  rest." 

"Hear !     Hear !"  shouted  Dick. 

"As  an  investment,"  I  said.  "If  we  can 
bring  this  old  town  to  life  it  will  pay  every 
mother's  son  in  it.  If  we  can  make  it  the 
livest,  the  most  beautiful  village  in  the  state, 
as  it  ought  to  be  made,  we'll  attract  a  desira- 
ble class  of  residents  and  double  real  estate 
values.  The  prosperity  of  every  citizen  is  the 
prosperity  of  the  community.  In  the  mean- 
while we'll  decrease  the  cost  of  living  here  and 
give  men  cash  to  pay  their  bills.  Good  Lord, 
there's  no  limit  as  to  what  can  be  done  if  we 
can  rouse  these  people.  I  tell  you  it's  a  great 
big  business  proposition  if  nothing  more." 

"By  George,  I  don't  know  but  what  you're 
right,  Dad,"  exclaimed  Dick.  "It  will  be  a 
game  worth  playing,  anyhow." 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   PIONEERS 

Our  plan  was  simple  and  to  the  point;  first 
to  organize  the  village  into  a  club  on  the  sim- 
plest and  broadest  lines.  It  was  to  be  called 
"The  Pioneers/'  and  every  taxpayer  and  the 
family  of  every  taxpayer  was  to  be  eligible 
for  membership.  The  membership  fee  was  to 
be  for  adults  one  dollar,  for  women  fifty  cents, 
for  boys  ten  cents.  We  were  to  have  a  presi- 
dent, a  secretary-treasurer,  and  a  board  of  five 
directors.  The  latter  were  to  pass  on  all  dis- 
bursements and  had  the  privilege  of  canceling 
membership  fees  in  any  worthy  case.  Our 
constitution  and  by-laws  were  to  be  merely  per- 
functory and  as  free  of  red  tape  as  was  con- 
sistent with  proper  organization. 

Holt,  a  young  lawyer  in  town  who  had 
taken  an  immediate  interest  in  the  plan,  un- 
dertook to  secure  the  pledges  for  the  thou- 
sand dollars  so  that  at  the  first  meeting  we 
might  have  something  tangible  to  present.  I 


THE  PIONEERS  85 

Headed  the  list  with  five  hundred  dollars,  he 
came  second  with  fifty,  and  Ed  Barclay  made 
up  another  fifty.  Holt  secured  the  rest  in  two 
days  from  the  village  merchants.  Not  a  man 
refused  to  subscribe.  On  the  face  of  it  the 
scheme  appealed  to  them  as  worth  a  try  any- 
how. It  took  no  argument  to  make  them  ap- 
preciate the  fact  that  their  business  was  de- 
pendent upon  the  prosperity  of  the  community, 
but  it  impressed  them  as  a  distinct  novelty  to 
attempt  anything  to  further  the  prosperity  of 
the  same  community  upon  which  they  were  de- 
pendent. They  had  always  accepted  condi- 
tions as  fixed  by  forces  over  which  they  had 
no  control.  They  were  like  farmers  who,  be- 
fore the  days  of  irrigation,  accepted  drought 
as  a  decree  of  God.  The  idea  of  doing  any- 
thing to  remedy  natural  conditions  never  oc- 
curred to  them.  This  new  plan  was  carrying 
matters  even  one  step  further;  it  was  an  at- 
tempt not  to  remedy  but  actually  to  create. 
The  argument  I  had  used  with  Dick  about  the 
town  being  a  big  unused  plant  appealed  to 
them,  \\iih  a  market  waiting  for  us  and 
plenty  of  labor  on  hand  we  proposed  to  set  the 
wheels  agoing  and  create  a  business  for  the 
merchants  and  for  every  citizen  in  the  town. 


86  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Three  days  later,  on  January  fifteenth,  the 
following  notice  prepared  by  Holt,  appeared 
in  the  local  paper  spread  over  half  the  front 
page  in  place  of  the  usual  stale  Washington 
correspondence : 

ATTENTION! 

Next  Wednesday  evening,  January  nine- 
teenth, a  meeting  will  be  held  in  the  Opera 
House  to  discuss  a  plan  for  putting  money  into 
the  pockets  of  every  resident  of  this  village. 

WE  ARE  GOING  TO  WAKE  UP! 

A  committee  of  citizens  has  contributed  the 
sum  of  ONE  THOUSAND  Dollars  which  will 
be  divided  among  those  who  attend  this  meet- 
ing and  fulfil  the  conditions. 

WrE  ARE  GOING  TO  WAKE  UP! 

Come  and  bring  the  whole  family.  The 
Woodmen  band  will  furnish  music. 

WE  SURE  ARE  GOING  TO  WAKE  UP! 

This  looked  to  me  a  little  bit  like  circus  ad- 
vertising and  I  wanted  Holt  to  tone  it  down, 
but  he  shook  his  head. 

"I'd  put  it  in  red  ink  if  they  had  any  in  the 
printing  shop,  but  they  haven't.  You  don't 
use  a  tinkly  silver  bell  when  you  want  to  call 


THE  PIONEERS  87 

this  bunch  in  the  morning ;  you  use  a  cow  bell." 
In  addition  to  this  we  had  the  same  call  to 
arms  printed  in  the  form  of  a  circular — Holt 
unearthed  some  green  paper  for  this — and 
mailed  a  copy  to  everyone  in  town.  Those  we 
had  left  over  we  tacked  up  in  the  stores  and 
on  telegraph  poles.  It's  pretty  certain  no  one 
missed  seeing  it,  and  if  they  did  they  had  to  be 
deaf  not  to  hear  about  it,  for  there  wasn't  much 
of  anything  else  talked  about  from  the  moment 
it  appeared.  We  wanted  to  get  everyone  to- 
gether for  once  if  we  never  did  again,  and  we 
certainly  succeeded. 

An  hour  before  the  meeting  was  called  to 
order  the  hall  was  packed  jam  full  and  there 
were  at  least  a  hundred  who  couldn't  get  in. 
There  is  something  electric  about  the  enthu- 
siasm of  people  in  just  being  together.  The 
whole  village  rubbing  shoulders  with  one  an- 
other in  a  bunch  had  its  effect.  They  were  on 
edge  with  excitement  and  began  to  show  signs 
of  waking  up  on  the  spot.  The  slightest  in- 
cident was  enough  to  send  a  laugh  through 
the  crowd  and  it  took  nothing  at  all  to  start  a 
cheer. 

Holt  was  flying  around  like  a  hen  with  its 
head  cut  off  trying  to  make  room  for  those 


88  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

outside,  collecting  chairs  and  poking  up  the 
janitor  to  keep  the  hall  warm.  His  face  was 
flushed  and  his  eyes  bright  with  the  excite- 
ment of  it.  I  myself  was  fairly  stage  struck 
when  I  looked  out  from  behind  the  wings  and 
saw  the  gathering.  I  found  it  difficult  to  catch 
my  breath  and  heartily  wished  someone  else 
was  going  to  preside.  I  tried  to  persuade  Holt 
to  open  the  meeting  but  he  wouldn't. 

"No,  siree,  you're  the  man.  Where's  that 
confounded  band?"  He  was  off  in  a  second 
to  round  them  up  and  make  out  the  programme 
for  the  music.  He  had  to  make  room  for  them 
on  the  stage  and  a  few  minutes  later  they  struck 
up  the  Star  Spangled  Banner.  After  they  had 
played  it  through  once  Holt  stepped  to  the  front 
after  nodding  towards  them  to  repeat. 
"Now,"  he  said,  "everyone  join  in." 
He  stood  there  like  the  leader  of  a  chorus 
beating  time  with  his  hands,  and  every  man, 
woman  and  child  sang  his  best.  They  sang 
the  second  verse  with  a  vim  that  strained  their 
throats.  As  I  watched  them  my  eyes  grew 
blurry  and  my  knees  weak.  I  began  to  ques- 
tion all  the  hard  things  I  had  said  about  them, 
for  if  ever  patriotism  was  expressed  in  music 
it  was  then.  It  seemed  to  me  that  a  hundred 


THE  PIONEERS  89 

years  and  more  rolled  back,  revealing  every 
man  here  as  ready  to  shoulder  a  musket  for  his 
country  as  ever  their  ancestors  had  been. 
When  the  singing  ceased  and  it  came  time  for 
me  to  step  forward  I  felt  worse  than  I  did  when 
as  a  boy  I  had  to  speak  a  piece  on  Friday  after- 
noon. I  was  appointed  temporary  chairman 
by  acclaim  and  then  started  in  to  deliver  the 
little  speech  I  had  prepared  for  the  occasion. 
But  I  hadn't  gone  far  before  I  forgot  it  and 
took  a  new  course.  At  first  I  had  been  self- 
conscious  like  a  bashful  man  among  strangers, 
but  when  I  was  used  to  the  many  eyes  staring 
at  me  I  felt  as  though  I  was  with  my  own 
family.  A  common  country  and  a  common 
cause  seemed  to  unite  us  on  the  spot.  I  had 
wished  to  avoid  the  personal.  Even  in  the  face 
of  the  publicity  I  have  already  given  the  little 
happenings  of  my  own  life,  I  can  truthfully 
say  I  don't  like  it.  But  I  felt  here  as  I  felt 
before  when  I  wrote  for  print,  that  what  a 
man  can  talk  of  from  his  own  knowledge  counts 
for  a  great  deal  more  than  his  theories.  So 
before  I  knew  it  I  found  myself  telling  briefly 
what  I  put  down  in  "One  Way  Out."  I  tried 
to  impress  upon  them  the  opportunities  that 
are  open  to  a  man  who  tackles  life  in  a  pio- 


90  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

neer  spirit  and  the  fun  of  the  fight.  Then  I 
rehearsed  what  their  ancestors  had  done  on 
these  same  acres  upon  which  they  now  lived 
and  tried  to  make  them  understand  that  if  to- 
day there  were  more  handicaps  there  were  also 
corresponding  opportunities.  I  spoke  of  the 
big  market  awaiting  their  produce  and  by  my 
personal  experiences  in  living  in  the  big  city 
made  them  understand  how  hungry  a  market 
it  was. 

"If  your  great  grandfathers  could  come  back 
here  to-day,"  I  said,  "there  isn't  a  man  of 
them  who  wouldn't  build  a  fortune  upon  this 
land." 

I  was  conscious  of  cheering  from  time  to 
time  but  I  didn't  realize  how  deeply  they  were 
really  moved  until  I  had  finished.  Then  I  be- 
came conscious  again  that  I  was  on  a  platform 
facing  them  and  I  saw  them  rise  to  their  feet 
and  cheer  again  and  again.  I  had  in  some 
way  introduced  Holt,  but  before  he  stepped 
forward  he  motioned  to  the  band  and  they 
struck  up  Yankee  Doodle  Dandy.  The  leader 
didn't  step  lively  enough  for  him  and  amid 
more  cheering  and  laughing  he  took  the  lead- 
er's place  and  led  them  off  at  a  quickstep  that 
made  the  whole  crowd  keep  pace  with  pound- 


THE  PIONEERS  91 

ing  feet.  Ruth  was  in  the  front  row  with 
Dick  and  I  caught  her  eye.  She  smiled  at  me 
in  a  way  that  made  me  very  proud. 

Holt,  taking  advantage  of  the  right  feeling 
I  had  created  in  the  audience,  developed  at 
once  the  practical  side  of  the  proposition. 

"Have  all  the  pioneers  died  or  moved 
West?"  he  demanded. 

"No!  No!"  came  the  reply  from  a  group 
of  the  younger  men. 

"Right!  Right!"  he  shouted.  "What  is 
more,  we're  going  to  prove  it.  We  have  a  fine 
example  here  in  Mr.  Carleton,  but  we  aren't 
going  to  allow  him  to  be  known  for  long  as 
the  only  living  specimen  of  pioneer  captivity." 

This  of  course  raised  a  laugh  and  then  he 
told  them  something  of  what  was  being  done 
in  the  middle  West  and  South  to  encourage 
farming.  Then  he  quoted  from  some  of  the 
reports  recently  made  by  the  government  and 
by  agricultural  schools  to  show  what  the  possi- 
bilities for  farming  were  right  in  New  Eng- 
land. 

"Now,"  he  said,  "what  we  want  to  do  is  to 
get  together  and  work  together  and  fight  to- 
gether and  accomplish  some  of  these  things 
ourselves.  The  trouble  with  us  is  that  it's 


92  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

been  every  man  for  himself  and  the  devil  take 
the  hindmost.  The  farmer  must  help  the  mer- 
chant and  the  merchant  help  the  farmer.  To 
this  end  it  is  proposed  that  we  organize  our- 
selves into  a  club  to  be  known  as  'The  Pio- 


neers/ 


This  was  greeted  with  a  cheer  and  then  Holt 
outlined  the  plan  as  we  had  already  outlined 
it  among  ourselves.  This  was  greeted  with 
a  still  noisier  cheer.  But  when  he  mentioned 
the  thousand  dollars  that  had  been  raised  as 
prize  money  the  audience  let  itself  loose. 

"Now,"  he  said  in  conclusion,  "I  move  you 
that  we  waste  no  further  time  in  discussion 
but  adopt  at  once  the  constitution  and  by-laws 
for  this  organization  as  here  prepared." 

It  was  seconded  and  carried  unanimously. 

"Now,"  said  Holt,  "I  move  you  that  Mr. 
William  Carleton  be  elected  president  of  this 
club  by  a  unanimous  vote." 

It  was  done. 

I  took  the  floor  again  and  nominated  Holt 
as  secretary-treasurer,  which  was  seconded 
and  passed. 

Then  Holt,  the  three  leading  merchants  and 
myself  were  elected  a  committee  of  five  direc- 
tors to  prepare  the  further  details.  The 


THE  PIONEERS  93 

meeting  then  adjourned  until  the  following 
Wednesday. 

Holt  had  ready  on  the  platform  paper  and 
ink  for  those  to  sign  who  wished  to  become 
members,  and  no  sooner  was  the  meeting  over 
than  a  rush  for  the  stage  began.  Two  hun- 
dred and  sixty-three  signatures  were  secured 
then  and  there  and  as  near  as  I  could  judge 
the  only  reason  everyone  in  the  hall  didn't  sign 
was  because  only  the  hardy  could  reach  the 
table. 

Now  no  one  could  have  asked  for  a  more  au- 
spicious beginning  than  this,  but  I  had  seen 
enough  of  how  men  act  in  a  group  to  know 
that  the  real  test  would  come  later  after  each 
individual  had  cooled  off  and  thought  over  the 
proposition  for  himself.  Consequently  while  I 
considered  this  evening's  enthusiasm  to  be  de- 
cidedly significant  and  boding  well  for  the 
scheme,  I  expected  a  slump  sooner  or  later. 
Holt  however  couldn't  see  even  a  speck  in  the 
clear  sky,  and  I  for  one  was  glad  of  it.  It's 
good  to  see  a  man  that  way. 

"They  jumped  at  it  like  a  hungry  trout  does 
at  a  worm,"  he  declared.  "This  is  just  the 
encouragement  for  which  they've  been  wait- 
ing twenty-five  years.  Before  next  Wednes- 


94 


NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 


day  I  expect  to  have  the  name  of  everyone  who 
can  hold  a  pen  on  that  list." 

And  Ruth  was  about  as  enthusiastic  as  Holt. 

"It  was  fine,  Billy,"  she  said.  "You  cer- 
tainly kept  your  promise  about  waking  them 
up." 

In  looking  back  over  these  last  few  pages  it 
strikes  me  that  perhaps  these  things  aren't  very 
important  but  my  pen  sort  of  ran  away  with 
me  as  I  remembered  that  first  meeting.  But 
then  again  maybe  these  details  are  significant 
as  showing  how  easy  it  was  to  rouse  these  peo- 
ple as  a  whole  in  contrast  with  how  difficult 
it  was  to  inspire  them  individually.  If  Holt 
and  I  had  taken  any  one  of  these  men  into  an 
office  and  given  him  the  same  talk  it  would 
have  gone  in  one  ear  and  out  the  other  without 
leaving  even  a  record  of  its  progress. 

During  the  next  week  the  five  of  us  worked 
hard  on  our  list  of  prizes.  We  wanted  the 
money  to  cover  as  much  ground  as  possible 
but  we  also  wanted  each  prize  to  be  substantial 
enough  to  be  tempting.  This  is  what  we 
finally  made  ready  to  report  to  the  next  meet- 
ing: 

i.  For  the  best  crop  of  hay  on  one  acre  of 
fresh  broken  land,  one  hundred  dollars. 


THE  PIONEERS  95 

2.  For  the  best  crop  of  hay  on  an  acre  of 
land  already  used  as  hay  land,  seventy-five  dol- 
lars. 

3.  For  the  best  crop  of  corn  on  an  acre  of 
land,  one  hundred  dollars. 

4.  For  the  best  house  garden,  seventy-five 
dollars. 

5.  For  the  best  market  garden,  seventy-five 
dollars. 

6.  For  the  best  flower  garden,  fifty  dollars. 

7.  For  the  best  potato  crop  per  acre,  one 
hundred  dollars. 

8.  For  the  largest  return  from  chickens  ac- 
cording to  capital  invested,  one  hundred  dol- 
lars. 

9.  For  the  largest  return  from  cows  accord- 
ing to  capital  invested,  one  hundred  dollars. 

10.  For  the  largest  return  from  pigs  ac- 
cording to  capital  invested,  one  hundred  dol- 
lars. 

11.  For  the  most  notable  improvement  in  an 
old  orchard,  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  dol- 
lars. 

This  seemed  at  the  time  and  it  seems  to  me 
to-day  a  pretty  fair  division.  It  gave  every- 
one a  chance  whether  the  owner  of  one  acre  or 
fifty,  and  it  was  varied  enough  to  interest 


96  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

everyone.  As  the  awards  were  to  be  made  on 
the  basis  of  capital  invested  it  gave  the  poor 
man  an  equal  chance  with  the  well-to-do. 

To  some  people  the  main  prizes  of  a  hun- 
dred dollars  may  seem  small,  but  just  remem- 
ber that  this  was  a  bonus  over  and  above  the 
regular  profit  a  man  was  sure  to  make  on  his 
six  months'  work.  Furthermore,  a  hundred 
dollars  in  the  country  means  a  good  deal  more 
than  it  does  in  the  city.  Furthermore  again, 
one  hundred  dollars  in  a  lump  sum  is  worth 
two  hundred  dollars  in  installments.  And 
finally,  one  hundred  dollars  as  a  prize  looks 
about  as  big  as  a  thousand  dollars.  I've 
known  men  to  spend  a  hundred  dollars  in  a 
lottery  and  consider  their  money  well  invested 
when  they  finally  drew  a  prize  of  five  dollars. 
In  every  newspaper  contest  you'll  find  men  do- 
ing a  hundred  dollars'  worth  of  work  to  get  a 
chance  at  a  ten  dollar  prize. 

• 

The  second  meeting  was  almost  as  well  at- 
tended as  the  first  and  the  committee's  report 
was  received  with  enthusiasm.  But  the  thing 
which  pleased  me  most  was  the  fact  that  it 
was  the  young  men  who  came  early  and 
crowded  up  into  the  front  of  the  hall.  Holt 


THE  PIONEERS  97 

noticed  this  and  pointed  out  a  goodly  number 
of  youngsters  who  never  before  had  taken  any 
interest  in  farming  at  all.  It  is  doubtful  if 
they  did  now  except  as  a  means  for  reaching 
the  prizes.  However,  that  point  didn't  worry 
me.  I  knew  that  in  order  to  win  the  money 
they  must  first  of  all  make  their  land  pay,  and 
once  they  got  into  their  heads  the  fact  the  soil 
would  pay,  half  our  object  was  attained. 

But  this  suggested  a  new  idea.  In  fact, 
every  step  we  took  suggested  further  develop- 
ment. Our  scheme  grew  by  itself  like  a  weed, 
which  to  my  mind  is  the  logical  way  for  an 
enterprise  of  this  sort  to  grow.  After  we  had 
adjourned  until  the  following  Wednesday  I 
called  the  attention  of  the  board  of  directors  to 
the  fact  that  so  many  young  men  who  had  al- 
ways affected  to  scorn  farming  showed  an  in- 
terest in  our  proposition. 

"Now,"  I  said,  "it  seems  to  me  a  pity  to  let 
them  go  at  their  work  in  haphazard  fashion. 
The  most  any  of  them  know,  probably,  is  to 
plow  and  harrow  the  soil,  put  in  their  seed, 
and  then  wait  for  results." 

"Well,"  said  Moulton,  "if  they  keep  down 
the  weeds  it  will  keep  them  out  of  mischief, 
anyhow." 


98  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"And  they'll  get  discouraged  in  a  season, 
if  not  sooner,"  I  said.  "No,  we  want  to  help 
them  do  more  than  that — we  want  them  to  get 
results.  It  won't  mean  anything  to  them  or  to 
you  if  they  don't." 

"Right,"  agreed  Holt.  "Swanson,  you're 
the  farmer  of  the  board.  It's  up  to  you  to  in- 
struct them." 

Swanson  had  a  fifty-acre  farm  on  which  he 
raised  hay  with  better  results  than  some,  sim- 
ply because  his  land  was  better. 

"They  prob'ly  think  they  know  more'n  I  do 
now,"  he  answered. 

There  wasn't  much  doubt  about  that,  for  no 
one  ever  has  much  faith  in  local  authority. 
Still  I  saw  the  old  man  was  rather  proud  that 
the  suggestion  had  been  made  and  I  didn't  wish 
to  hurt  his  feelings. 

"Mr.  Swanson  is  a  busy  man,"  I  said. 
"What  we  want  is  someone  who  can  come  here 
and  address  the  club  as  a  club.  I  thought  that 
possibly  the  State  Agricultural  School  might 
help  us  out." 

Swanson  threw  up  his  head  at  this  like  an 
old  war  horse  scenting  a  battle. 

"Huh,"  he  grunted,  "what  do  them  fellers 


THE  PIONEERS  99 

know  'bout  farmin'?  Half  of  'em  never  held 
a  plow  handle  in  their  lives." 

"Maybe  you're  right,"  I  said,  "but  if  it's  true 
I'd  like  to  have  one  of  them  down  here  and 
help  show  him  up." 

"What  they  don't  know  'bout  farmin'  would 
fill  a  book,"  he  growled. 

"We'll  put  you  down  in  the  audience  and  let 
you  pop  questions  at  them,"  I  laughed.  "Any- 
way it  ought  to  keep  up  the  interest  of  the  club 
until  spring.  No  harm  done  anyway.  I  put 
the  motion  that  I  be  instructed  to  write  the 
school  and  see  what  can  be  done." 

"Seconded,"  chirped  in  Holt. 

Swanson  didn't  object,  and  so  the  next  day 
I  sent  off  my  letter.  In  it  I  told  briefly  what 
we  had  done  and  what  we  wished  to  do  and 
asked  for  advice.  To  my  surprise  I  received 
at  once  an  enthusiastic  letter  from  the  presi- 
dent himself  asking  for  a  personal  interview. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE    NEW    WAY 

In  conversation  with  a  dozen  or  more  of  the 
better  farmers  of  our  town  in  an  endeavor  to 
get  at  the  most  important  features  of  what  in 
the  way  of  instructions  we  needed,  I  was  sur- 
prised to  find  that  suspicion  of  agricultural 
school  methods  was  general.  The  farmer 
looked  as  much  askance  at  these  teachers  as 
he  did  at  college  men.  They  thought  them 
steeped  in  book  learning  and  without  practical 
experience.  If  they  admitted  that  at  the  ex- 
periment stations  these  men  produced  fine  re- 
sults, it  was  only  to  add,  "But  thet  ain't  runnin' 
a  farm  by  a  long  shot."  In  some  cases  farmers 
had  actually  sent  soil  to  be  analyzed  and  had 
followed  instructions  about  seeds  and  ferti- 
lizers, whether  accurately  or  not  I  don't  know, 
but  certainly  without  gaining  confidence  in  the 
new  methods.  This  seemed  to  me  a  pity  for 
the  farmer  if  he  was  wrong  and  a  pity  for  the 
taxpayer,  who  was  furnishing  funds  to  sup- 

100 


THE  NEW  WAY  101 

port  these  schools,  if  the  farmer  was  right. 
So  while  I  didn't  receive  much  encouragement 
for  this  new  feature  of  our  enterprise  1  went 
to  town  to  meet  the  president  of  the  agricul- 
tural school,  primed  with  a  few  opinions  which 
I  thought  might  wake  him  up  at  any  rate. 

I  will  call  him  Dennison.  I  found  him  a 
gentle,  scholarly-looking  man  of  sixty,  with 
earnest  eyes  and  with  an  air  that  impressed  me 
at  once  with  his  sincerity.  There  was,  how- 
ever, about  his  mouth  an  expression  of  weary 
resignation  as  of  a  man  who  has  fought  a 
long  fight  without  particularly  encouraging  re- 
sults. He  was  very  cordial  and  wanted  to  hear 
at  once  just  what  our  scheme  was.  I  told  him 
briefly  how  our  ultimate  hope  was  to  arouse 
the  pioneer  spirit  in  the  village  and  of  the  very 
practical  incentive  we  had  given  to  rouse,  first 
of  all,  the  ambition  of  the  men  to  till  the  soil. 

"This  prize  system,"  I  explained  to  him,  "is 
only  a  quick  method  of  getting  the  community 
started.  It  gives  the  men  something  to  work 
for  that  seems  to  them  tangible.  A  possible 
five  hundred  dollar  profit  is  vague  and  condi- 
tional, while  a  hundred  dollars  deposited  in  the 
bank  is  definite  and  concrete.  They'll  work 
for  that." 


102  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"I  don't  know  but  what  you're  right,"  he 
said,  as  though  impressed  by  the  new  idea. 
"At  any  rate  the  experiment  is  worth  foster- 
ing. I'll  send  you  down  all  the  speakers  you'll 
listen  to." 

"Thanks,"  I  said,  "but  right  here  is  where 
we  must  use  some  judgment.  These  people 
are  queer,  and — well,  I'll  tell  you  frankly  they 
haven't  much  faith  in  you  fellows." 

He  didn't  take  offense.  He  just  smiled — a 
weary,  patient  kind  of  smile. 

'That's  the  pity  of  it,"  he  said. 

"And  what's  the  reason  of  it?"  I  asked  di- 
rectly. 

"I  take  it  you  haven't  lived  long  among  them 
yourself,"  he  answered. 

"No,  I  haven't,"  I  said,  "but  I  expect  to  live 
among  them  from  now  on.  I've  seen  a  lot  of 
them  as  it  is,  because  I've  taken  pains  to." 

He  nodded. 

"And  I'll  give  you  my  own  theory  first,"  I 
said.  "What  we  want  down  our  way  are  prac- 
tical men.  At  this  stage  we  don't  want  the- 
oretical farmers.  We  don't  want  to  learn  just 
yet  the  chemistry  of  farming,  but  how  to  make 
the  most  out  of  our  land  with  the  materials 
at  hand.  We  aren't  looking  for  the  best  re- 


THE  NEW  WAY  103 

suits,  but  the  most  practical  results.  I  wish 
you  could  teach  us  how  to  raise  potatoes,  hay, 
corn  and  garden  stuff  with  the  aid  of  plain 
old-fashioned  manure,  a  plain  old-fashioned 
plow,  and  plain  old-fashioned  sweat  and  elbow 
grease.  The  other  can  come  later." 

Again  he  smiled. 

"Are  you  a  college  man,  Mr.  Carleton?"  he 
asked. 

"No,"  I  answered,  wondering  what  that  had 
to  do  with  it. 

Then  he  took  from  his  bag  a  catalogue  of 
the  school  and  went  over  with  me  the  details 
of  the  courses  given.  While  there  was  a  back- 
ground of  considerable  theory,  I  must  admit 
the  work  also  covered  about  every  practical 
branch  of  farming  I  had  ever  heard  of. 

"Don't  you  think  a  man  who  mastered  these 
courses  would  know  something  about  farm- 
ing?" he  asked. 

"He  should,"  I  said.  "It  certainly  makes 
me  feel  as  though  I'd  like  to  go  through  the 
school  myself." 

"You  ought  to,"  he  said. 

"Well,"  I  said,  "you  turn  out  about  forty 
graduates  a  year.  What  do  most  of  the  boys 
do?" 


104  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Teach,"  he  answered. 

"Most  of  them  come  from  farms  ?" 

"Yes." 

"Few  of  them  go  back  to  the  farms  ?" 

"Not  many,"  he  answered  uneasily.  "But 
some  secure  positions  as  farm  managers." 

"Managers  of  other  people's  farms?" 

"Yes,  of  course.  Most  of  the  young  men 
have  limited  means  and  are  without  the  capital 
to  buy  farms  of  their  own." 

"But  why  don't  they  return  to  the  farms 
they  left  before  they  came  to  school?" 

"I  suppose  they  feel  the  opportunities  there 
aren't  large  enough  for  them." 

"Exactly,"  I  said.  "Now,  Mr.  Dennison, 
I'm  not  a  farmer;  I'm  a  business  man.  I'm 
taking  hold  of  the  possibilities  of  this  village 
where  I  live  as  a  business  enterprise.  And  I'm 
not  a  teacher.  I'm  not  in  a  position  to  criticise 
your  work  here  except  as  a  business  man  who 
wants  to  use  some  of  it  to  help  along  his 
business  enterprise.  But  right  here  I'd  like 
to  say  frankly  that  it  doesn't  seem  to  me  it 
would  pay  to  hire  instruction  which  ends  by 
making  the  employee  discontented  with  his 
work." 

"With  equal  frankness  allow  me  to  say  I  con- 


THE  NEW  WAY  105 

sider  that  a  very  narrow  way  of  looking  at  it," 
he  answered. 

"Don't  think  I'm  considering  my  own 
pocket,"  I  said.  "I'm  only  general  manager 
for  the  group  represented  by  the  club.  What 
I  mean  is  that  what  we  ourselves  particularly 
want  is  instruction  which  will  help  every  man 
to  thrive  and  gain  content  on  his  own  land  and 
won't  leave  him  ambitious  to  neglect  it  for  a 
larger  enterprise  somewhere  else.  That  ten- 
dency is  just  what  we're  fighting.  There's 
been  too  much  of  'Go  west,  young  man.'  Our 
battle  cry  is  'Stay  at  home,  young  man.'  Hon- 
estly now — isn't  that  what  New  England 
needs?" 

"Perhaps,"  he  nodded. 

"Inspiration  to  stay  at  home  and  compete 
with  the  old  world  pioneers  who  are  pushing 
him  hard,  that's  what  the  native  New  Eng- 
lander  needs,"  I  repeated. 

"Ah,  those  foreigners,"  he  sighed.  "If  I 
had  stuff  like  that  to  handle." 

"You  might  spoil  it,"  I  said,  laughing  in  my 
turn. 

"Perhaps  you're  right,"  he  joined  in.  "After 
all,  there's  no  substitute  for  sheer  industry." 

Well,  the  upshot  of  our  pleasant  argument 


io6  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

was  that  he  offered  to  do  all  he  could  to  help  us 
in  our  project. 

"After  all,"  he  said,  "there  are  only  five  es- 
sentials in  good  farming.  The  first  is  to  de- 
termine what  the  land  lacks  by  analysis  (don't 
get  frightened — we'll  do  that  much  for  you)  ; 
the  second  is  to  supply  that  lack  by  proper  fer- 
tilization; the  third  is  proper  selection  of  seed; 
the  fourth  is  proper  rotation  of  crops  so  that 
one  crop  will  put  back  what  the  previous  crop 
has  taken  out ;  and  the  fifth  is  just  hard  work 
in  keeping  the  land  cultivated.  I  don't  see  why 
in  a  general  way  that  ground  couldn't  be  cov- 
ered between  now  and  spring.  At  any  rate 
I'm  willing  to  try  it  if  you'll  furnish  the  enthu- 
siasm." 

"I'll  do  that  if  I  have  to  hire  a  brass  band," 
I  said.  But  I  didn't  need  a  brass  band.  With 
that  prize  money  in  prospect  there  wasn't  a 
man  who  dared  stay  away  for  fear  the  other 
fellow  might  secure  an  advantage  over  him. 
We  had  two  lectures  a  week  open  only  to  mem- 
bers of  the  club.  We  tried  to  make  them  as 
informal  as  possible  and  at  the  conclusion  of 
each  talk  threw  the  meeting  open  for  questions. 
Holt  took  down  each  lecture  in  shorthand  and 
I  had  a  half  dozen  copies  made  at  my  own 


THE  NEW  WAY  107 

expense.  We  kept  one  of  these  for  the  club 
as  a  matter  of  record  but  the  others  were  at 
Holt's  office  where  any  member  was  allowed 
to  take  one  for  not  over  three  days  so  that  he 
might  copy  for  himself  anything  he  wished. 
It  was  surprising  how  soon  those  copies  be- 
came thumb-marked  and  dog-eared. 

The  speakers  kept  true  to  my  requirements 
and  followed  substantially  the  outline  laid  out 
by  Dennison  at  our  first  interview.  The  first 
speaker  took  up  the  matter  of  soil  and  had  a 
difficult  task  on  his  hands  to  convince  these 
men  that  not  all  dirt  was  soil  and  that  not  all 
soils  were  the  same. 

"There's  as  much  difference  in  land  as  there 
is  in  stock,"  he  said.  "And  if  you  want  the 
best  returns  you  have  to  handle  it  just  as  ten- 
derly and  feed  it  just  as  properly.  The  next 
time  you  plant  a  cornfield  don't  think  of  it  as  a 
field  but  as  a  well  bred  cow  or  horse.  Groom 
it  as  you  would  groom  your  horse  or  cow  and 
feed  it  with  the  same  care.  Remember,  too, 
that  just  as  you  don't  expect  your  horse  to  give 
work  or  your  cow  to  give  milk  without  supply- 
ing the  necessary  material  out  of  which  to  make 
work  and  make  milk;  you  can't  expect  your 
field  to  give  you  back  corn  unless  you  supply 


io8  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

it  with  the  material  for  making  corn.  That 
sounds  reasonable,  doesn't  it?  The  poor 
farmer  is  the  only  workingman  in  the  world 
except  the  Wall  Street  sucker  who  expects  to 
get  something  for  nothing.  Nature  supplies 
most  of  the  elements  free  of  charge,  but  what- 
ever you  take  out  you  have  to  put  back." 

Then  he  went  on  to  explain  how  different 
soils  need  different  foods  just  as  much  as  dif- 
ferent kinds  of  stock  need  different  foods. 

"It  all  depends  upon  what  you  want  to  get 
back.  If  you  want  back  eggs  you  use  the  food 
that  will  make  eggs;  if  you  want  back  fat  you 
use  the  food  that  will  make  fat;  if  you  want 
back  milk,  you  use  the  food  that  will  make  milk, 
and  so  on.  Now,  some  of  your  land  is  already 
adapted  by  nature  to  supply  certain  things — 
corn,  wheat,  hay,  potatoes,  what  not.  When 
that  is  so,  use  what  is  given  you.  If,  however, 
the  land  hasn't  those  elements  you  must  supply 
them,  either  by  fertilizers  or  by  planting  a 
preparatory  crop  that  will  use  what  is  already 
present  and  leave  behind  what  you  want  for  the 
final  crop." 

This  likening  of  land  to  live  stock  was  a  fine 
idea.  It  impressed  every  man  in  the  club.  I 
know  that  in  my  own  case  I  had  always  thought 


THE  NEW  WAY  109 

of  land  as  about  as  fixed  and  abstract  as  a 
problem  in  geometry.  This  treating  it  as 
something  living — as  of  course  it  really  is — 
gave  a  man  a  new  attitude  towards  it.  It  made 
plausible  all  the  theories  of  care  which  fol- 
lowed. A  man  knows  he  has  to  feed  and  care 
for  his  live  stock.  If  so,  then  why  not  his 
land,  which  is  also  a  living  thing? 

The  second  man  took  up  the  matter  of  fertili- 
zation— the  restoring  to  the  land  such  elements 
as  have  been  used  up  by  the  previous  crops  and 
given  back  to  the  farmer  in  the  form  of  pro- 
duce. It's  an  amazingly  simple  proposition 
when  you  stop  to  think  about  it.  It's  merely 
paying  back  money  you've  borrowed.  If,  after 
doing  that  a  profit  isn't  left,  you  can't  blame 
the  money. 

The  third  man  covered  the  proper  selection 
of  seeds.  Like  the  previous  speakers  he 
pleaded  for  the  substitution  of  horse  sense  and 
care  in  place  of  the  present  haphazard  meth- 
ods. No  more  than  all  dirt  is  land  are  all  ker- 
nels seeds.  You  must  be  sure  that  the  seeds 
you  plant  are  live  seeds.  The  usual  method  is 
to  plant  them  and  if  you  get  a  crop,  the  seeds 
were  surely  alive;  if  you  don't  get  a  crop,  the 
seeds  were  surely  dead.  But  there  is  no  need 


1 10  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

of  risking  your  season's  work  on  such  an  ex- 
periment. Take  a  sample  fifty  from  your  seeds 
a  month  or  so  before  planting  time,  place  these 
in  a  box  and  cover  with  earth,  keep  moist  and 
warm  and  count  the  number  of  seeds  which 
sprout.  There  you  have  as  accurate  a  method 
of  determining  their  germinating  value  as  any 
chemist  could  give.  If  the  seeds  don't  come 
up  in  a  decent  percentage,  get  some  more.  If 
they  do,  you  have  insured  your  crop  so  far  as 
the  seeds  are  concerned.  The  whole  scheme 
of  modern  farming  is  to  eliminate  from  the  be- 
ginning all  elements  of  chance  so  far  as  possi- 
ble, which  is  no  more  than  every  other  business 
man  does. 

The  fourth  speaker  took  up  the  rotation  of 
crops,  which  is  a  somewhat  more  abstract 
proposition  than  the  others.  It  seems  that 
nearly  every  crop  both  takes  from  the  land 
what  it  needs  and  gives  back  to  a  certain  ex- 
tent something  else  in  its  place.  Nature  is  no 
hog  and  generally  pays  her  way.  The  whole 
secret  is  to  so  alternate  your  crops  as  to  take 
full  advantage  of  this  fact.  The  matter  has 
been  determined  to  a  science. 

The  fifth  speaker  dwelt  upon  the  necessity 
of  proper  cultivation — of  plowing  deep  and 


THE  NEW  WAY  in 

harrowing  often.  Here  again  was  something 
that  was  within  the  understanding  of  the 
average  man.  Your  soil  and  seeds  need  air 
and  light  as  much  as  your  live  stock.  You 
wouldn't  expect  a  cow  to  thrive  shut  up  in  a 
dark  stall  with  little  air.  When  you  harrow 
you  do  no  more  than  throw  open  the  barn  win- 
dows and  let  in  the  sunshine. 

I  have  run  over  in  this  general  way  the 
ground  covered  by  the  speakers  merely  to  show 
how  simply  and  reasonably  this  subject  of  busi- 
ness-like farming  can  be  presented  when  done 
right.  It  is  neither  an  abstract  nor  a  com- 
plex study  and  the  essentials  can  be  brought 
home  to  the  every-day  farmer  in  a  very  few 
months. 

Each  speaker,  moreover,  at  my  suggestion, 
besides  treating  his  special  subject  took  occa- 
sion to  talk  on  farming  as  a  profession — and 
especially  farming  in  New  England.  They 
emphasized  the  fact  that  farming  is  a  big  busi- 
ness proposition,  an  honorable  calling,  and 
not  merely  an  effort  to  raise  food  supplies  for 
the  home.  They  all  dwelt  on  the  fact  that  New 
England  always  had  been  and  still  is  a  farm- 
ing region.  Modern  conditions  instead  of  de- 
stroying its  value  as  an  agricultural  country 


112  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

have  really  increased  that  value  by  giving  a 
larger  market.  But — they  emphasized  again 
and  again — hard  work  is  required,  concen- 
trated intelligent  effort,  in  order  to  bring  re- 
sults. This  is  true  of  every  business.  The 
days  of  fifty  years  ago  when  almost  any  slip- 
shod method  was  bound  to  bring  a  profit,  have 
passed.  Farming  has  been  the  last  business  to 
accept  modern  business  conditions,  but  the 
time  has  now  come  when  it  must.  Waste  can 
no  longer  be  tolerated  here  any  more  than  in 
other  forms  of  business.  A  man  to  succeed 
must  harbor  every  resource  and  use  every  by- 
product. As  one  man  said,  "So  keen  is  com- 
petition to-day,  so  slight  a  margin  of  profit 
is  there  between  competing  houses,  that  very 
often  the  man  who  shows  a  profit  is  the  man 
ingenious  enough  to  make  it  from  the  by-prod- 
ucts which  twenty-five  years  ago  were 
spurned." 

One  speaker  spoke  of  the  Chinese  and  the 
tender  care  they  bestow  upon  a  few  hundred 
square  feet  of  land  and  the  results  secured  from 
this. 

"Our  ancestors  were  both  hard  workers  and 
thrifty,"  said  he,  "and  we  must  get  back  to 
their  standards.  We  in  the  East  have  been 


THE  NEW  WAY  113 

spoiled  as  well  as  despoiled  by  the  West.  We 
have  listened  to  stories  of  thousand-acre  farms, 
steam  plows,  and  million-bushel  crops,  until 
our  own  opportunities  seem  petty  by  compari- 
son. We  have  heard  of  Oregon  fruit  farms 
until  our  own  fruit  doesn't  seem  worth  culti- 
vating. But  that's  all  wrong.  You  ought  to 
realize  it  when  in  spite  of  the  million  dollar 
crops  you  find  yourselves  paying  more  and 
more  every  year  for  your  flour.  You  ought  to 
realize  it  whenever  you  go  to  the  grain  mill 
and  pay  out  your  good  money  for  corn  that  you 
might  as  well  raise  yourselves.  As  for  Ore- 
gon apples — don't  let  them  frighten  you.  If 
nature  gives  them  size  and  color,  she  makes 
them  pay  for  it  in  juice  and  flavor.  They  look 
well  in  boxes,  those  apples,  but  the  world  is 
learning  to  buy  New  England  apples  to  eat. 
There  isn't  a  better  apple  country  on  the  globe 
than  New  England." 

Good  straight  talk  that,  and  it  had  its  effect. 
You  could  see  the  audience  straighten  up  and 
hold  themselves  the  better  for  it.  Every  meet- 
ing was  well  attended  and  there  was  never 
the  slightest  sign  of  restlessness  in  the  audi- 
ences, though  sometimes  the  talks  lasted  nearly 
two  hours. 


114  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

In  the  meanwhile  Ruth  in  her  quiet  way  was 
doing  as  much  as  the  rest  of  us  to  keep  up  in- 
terest in  the  undertaking.  She  made  it  a  point 
to  get  acquainted  with  all  the  farmer  wives 
in  the  neighborhood.  She  had  them  up  to  the 
house  in  groups  and  dropped  many  a  word  of 
encouragement  and  gave  many  a  bit  of  advice 
which  came  from  a  full  experience. 

"Billy,"  she  said  to  me  one  night,  "it's  the 
deadly  uninspired  routine  of  their  lives  that's 
killing  the  women.  They  cook  and  sew  and 
scrub  without  a  single  dream  to  help  them 
along.  And  that's  because  the  men  don't 
dream.  If  you  succeed  in  rousing  the  hus- 
bands and  sons  you'll  bring  the  wives  and 
mothers  to  life,  too." 

"That's  what  we  want  to  do,"  I  said. 

"It  shows  that  it  isn't  lack  of  money  that 
makes  poverty,  Billy,"  she  said.  "All  these 
women  have  good  homes  and  plenty  to  eat  and 
wear  and  yet — and  yet  I  honestly  believe  they 
are  poorer  than  our  old  friends  of  the  tene- 
ments." 

"We  were  never  so  poor  in  our  lives  as  when 
we  lived  with  plenty  to  eat  and  wear  in  the  sub- 
urbs," I  reminded  her. 

"That's  just  it,"  she  nodded.     "This  is  the 


THE  NEW  WAY  115 

same  kind  of  poverty.  It  comes  from  the  fact 
that  for  these  women  life  ends  with  the  end  of 
each  day.  They  die  every  time  they  crawl 
into  bed  at  night.  There  is  never  anything  for 
them  to  look  forward  to  on  the  morrow." 

"If  we  could  only  make  them  realize  that 
this  condition  is  largely  their  own  fault — " 

"That  wouldn't  make  any  difference  at  all," 
she  broke  in;  "we  must  change  the  conditions. 
Most  of  our  misfortunes  are  our  own  fault, 
but  that  doesn't  make  them  any  less  misfor- 
tunes. It's  another  misfortune  that  our  mis- 
fortunes are  our  own  fault.  I  don't  know  but 
what  that's  the  worst  misfortune  of  all." 

She  was  right.  It  doesn't  do  much  good  to 
blame  people  for  their  faults.  We  ourselves, 
after  making  public  our  experiences  in  the  sub- 
urbs, received  many  hard  letters  from  people 
who  couldn't  see  anything  in  our  plight  but  the 
well  deserved  consequences  of  our  own  folly. 
If  we  hadn't  done  this  or  that,  if  we  had  done 
this  or  that,  we  were  assured  that  we  would 
have  come  out  all  right.  To  be  sure.  That 
applies  to  every  human  being  who  ever  tried  to 
live  this  life.  If  we  were  all  as  wise  as  Solo- 
mon to  start  with  and  lived  up  to  all  Solomon's 
precepts,  then  would  come  the  millennium.  But 


Ii6  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

we  aren't.  We  all  have  to  learn  and  in  the 
learning  we  make  many  mistakes.  Then  we 
make  them  again. 

And  the  man  who  blames  us  and  lets  it  go  at 
that  isn't  our  friend,  and  some  day  is  going  to 
make  a  mistake  himself. 


CHAPTER  IX 

SPRING 

I  don't  think  a  winter,  in  our  town,  ever 
passed  more  quickly  or  more  pleasantly  than 
this  winter.  The  months  flew  by  like  weeks 
and  the  weeks  like  days.  When  the  first  warm 
melting  days  came  in  late  April  everyone  be- 
gan to  get  impatient.  It  seemed  as  though  the 
snow  would  never  leave  the  ground,  and  many 
didn't  wait  for  this  before  plotting  out  their 
crops  and  digging  up  samples  of  soil  to  send 
to  the  agricultural  school.  Seeds  were  bought 
and  tested  and  farming  tools  brought  out  and 
put  in  order. 

It's  good  to  be  in  the  country  in  the  spring. 
It  was  my  first  experience  and  the  change  took 
place  like  a  miracle.  I  saw  trees  that  looked 
as  dead  as  fence  posts  start  to  life  with  the 
stirring  sap;  I  saw  little  green  grass  blades 
appear  among  the  brown  waste  of  dead  blades ; 
I  saw  all  manner  of  living  things  awake  and 
creep  out  of  their  winter  hiding  places  until  the 

117 


ii8  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

earth  looked  almost  as  though  the  resurrection 
trumpet  had  blown. 

Spring  means  a  great  deal  more  to  us  farm- 
ers than  it  does  to  city  folk.  She  comes  like  a 
partner  returning  from  a  winter  vacation, 
takes  down  the  shutters,  sweeps  the  store  clean 
and  stands  at  the  door  ready  for  business. 
She  comes  with  unlimited  capital  which  is  fur- 
nished everyone  for  the  asking.  If  men  will 
have  none  of  it  even  then  she  does  not  stand 
idle,  but  for  the  sake  of  the  housewives  and 
the  children  proceeds  on  her  own  hook  to  make 
the  world  as  beautiful  as  possible;  sprinkles  the 
trees  with  blossoms  and  perfume,  scatters  the 
ground  with  flowers,  sweetens  the  air  with 
song.  You  can't  escape  her  bounty  if  you 
will.  This  year,  however,  she  couldn't  com- 
plain of  lack  of  cooperation. 

Hardly  had  the  frost  fairly  left  the  ground 
when  there  was  an  unprecedented  demand  in 
our  town  for  horses  and  plows.  There  were 
not  enough  to  go  around.  I  let  Hadley  go  in 
order  to  take  the  many  jobs  that  were  offered 
him,  but  with  every  plow  and  horse  in  the 
neighborhood  in  use  I  saw  much  land  that 
would  be  late  for  seed.  If  tangible  evidence 
was  needed  of  what  the  Pioneer  Club  had  al- 


SPRING  119 

ready  accomplished  it  was  in  this  state  of  af- 
fairs. There  had  been  no  difficulty  the  year 
before.  One  Sunday  Holt  and  I  scoured  the 
surrounding  towns  for  men  and  horses  and  se- 
cured six  teams  on  the  promise  of  at  least 
a  week's  work  for  each.  They  were  willing 
enough  to  come,  even  though  in  doing  so  they 
neglected  their  own  work.  It  was  the  old 
story  of  their  being  willing  for  five  dollars  a 
day  cash  in  hand  to  jeopardize  a  future  ten. 
However,  that  was  their  own  lookout  and  I 
quieted  my  conscience  with  the  thought  that 
if  we  made  as  good  as  we  hoped  to  do  the  in- 
fluence of  this  would  spread  to  the  neighboring 
towns.  They  were  mighty  curious  as  to  what 
was  going  on. 

"What's  got  into  you  people,  anyhow?"  asked 
one  man. 

"We're  getting  ready  for  the  planting,"  I 
said. 

"Well,  something  must  have  happened  to 
make  you  so  all-fired  busy  down  your  way,"  one 
of  them  answered.  Even  among  neighboring 
towns  our  village  had  a  bad  reputation. 

I  told  him  about  the  Pioneer  Club  and  the 
prizes  that  were  being  offered.  The  amount 
made  his  eyes  stick  out. 


120  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Gee,"  he  answered,  "guess  I'll  have  to  move 
down." 

"You're  welcome,"  I  said.  "Come  and  bring 
your  family." 

We  certainly  did  look  like  a  busy  commu- 
nity. Drive  along  the  roads  in  any  direction 
and  you'd  see  acre  after  acre  of  upturned  land. 
The  smell  of  new  earth  was  in  the  air  and  it 
was  like  tonic  even  to  the  passerby. 

During  this  busy  preparatory  season  Holt 
kept  his  law  office  open  evenings  and  it  came 
to  be  a  sort  of  club  room.  I  planned  to  stay 
down  there  every  evening  until  eleven  and  the 
two  of  us  tried  to  straighten  out  the  difficul- 
ties that  arose.  One  of  these  was  seeing  to  it 
that  every  man  who  showed  himself  to  be  in 
earnest  had  a  proper  supply  of  material  with 
which  to  start  his  crop.  We  made  arrange- 
ments with  Moulton  and  with  Gordon  the  hard- 
ware man  to  extend  reasonable  credit  to  every- 
one even  in  cases  where  credit  had  been 
withdrawn.  Our  argument  that  it  was  wiser 
to  help  a  man  get  on  his  feet  than  keep  him 
down  was  sound  on  the  face  of  it. 

"These  fellows  mean  business  now,"  I  said 
to  Gordon,  "and  if  we  go  on  half  as  well  as 
we've  begun  there  won't  be  a  man  in  this  vil- 


SPRING  121 

lage  who  within  a  couple  of  years  won't  be  able 
to  pay  his  bills.  It's  up  to  you  to  do  your  part. 
Their  success  is  your  success.  Give  them 
credit  for  everything  but  patent  medicines  and 
you  won't  lose." 

While  it  was  true  that  in  doing  this  Gor- 
don was  choosing  the  lesser  of  two  evils  I  re- 
alized that  it  wasn't  exactly  fair  either  to  force 
him  and  a  few  other  merchants  to  bear  the 
burden  of  financing  these  men  without  inter- 
est. But  the  small  farmer  is  in  a  bad  position. 
When  the  commercial  business  house  needs 
money  it  can  go  to  a  bank  and  upon  a  state- 
ment of  its  business  and  its  rating  obtain 
money  and  credit  on  its  signature.  A  small 
farmer  has  no  business  rating  and  can  get 
money  only  upon  a  mortgage  at  six  per  cent., 
which  is  almost  prohibitive.  Of  course  the 
banks  can't  be  blamed  for  treating  with  in- 
dividuals in  this  way  but  it  struck  me  that 
something  might  be  done  about  this  if  ever 
we  got  the  community  as  a  whole  firmly  bound 
together.  The  combined  security  of  all  the 
land  and  business  in  the  village  ought  to  mean 
something  to  a  bank. 

In  the  meantime  I  was  not  neglecting  my 
own  land.  I  realized  that  there  wasn't  much 


122  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

use  in  preaching  the  profits  of  farming  unless 
I  at  least  made  the  attempt  to  demonstrate  it 
on  my  own  acres.  While  on  the  one  hand  I 
was  handicapped  by  lack  of  practical  training, 
it  struck  me  that  this  would  make  the  experi- 
ment all  the  more  interesting  as  showing  what 
could  be  done  by  a  man  who  availed  himself 
of  the  knowledge  of  others,  which,  through  the 
government  bureaus  and  the  State  Agricul- 
tural School,  was  freely  offered  to  everyone. 

Before  this  series  of  lectures  I  don't  believe 
any  human  being  ever  knew  less  about  farm- 
ing than  I  did.  I  hadn't  spent  even  my  vaca- 
tions on  a  farm.  I  couldn't  tell  wheat  in  the 
field  from  oats.  I  couldn't  tell  a  squash  from 
a  pumpkin.  I  didn't  know  anything  about 
soils,  about  seeds,  about  fertilizers,  about  cul- 
tivation. My  mind  was  a  blank  on  the  subject, 
which  at  least  had  the  advantage  of  making  me 
free  of  prejudices. 

I  don't  mean  to  say  that  even  after  the  su- 
perficial course  of  lectures  to  which  I  listened 
this  winter  that  I  felt  myself  an  authority  on 
the  subject.  I  didn't.  But  on  the  other  hand 
everything  that  was  said  sounded  so  much  like 
just  plain  common  sense  that  I  didn't  see  why 
any  fairly  intelligent  man  couldn't  put  the  the- 


SPRING  123 

ories  into  practice,  especially  when  he  had  the 
Agricultural  School  back  of  him,  ready  and 
eager  to  give  further  advice. 

Take  for  example  the  matter  of  orchards. 
I  found  on  my  place  some  seventy-five  apple 
trees  all  cluttered  up  with  dead  limbs.  It 
didn't  require  a  farmer  to  realize  that  any  tree 
was  handicapped  by  such  a  burden.  I  took  a 
saw  and  cut  out  all  this  dead  wood  and  a  little 
later,  when  the  shoots  had  started,  trimmed 
off  all  those  which  obviously  were  useless. 
Then,  still  following  out  instructions,  I  scraped 
the  bark  on  the  trunks  and  whitewashed  them. 
This  was  no  more  than  common  sense  groom- 
ing, such  as  one  would  give  live  stock.  Then. 
I  girdled  the  trunks  with  burlap  to  prevent  in- 
sects from  crawling  up  to  the  young  leaves. 
After  this,  I  spaded  up  around  the  roots  so 
that  air  and  water  and  sunshine  could  get  in. 
Until  now  the  dead  sod  had  matted  down  into 
a  covering  that  was  about  as  impervious  to  air 
and  moisture  as  a  rubber  blanket. 

Hadley  watched  me  with  cynical  indiffer- 
ence. To  him  it  seemed  as  foolish  to  bestow 
all  this  care  upon  gnarled  old  apple  trees  as  it 
would  to  give  the  same  attention  to  a  full  grown 
man  that  a  woman  bestows  upon  an  infant. 


124  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

He  believed  that  a  tree  would  grow  anyway 
and  was  outside  the  province  of  farming. 

"Only  wastin'  your  time,"  he  said.  "Them 
trees  won't  never  do  nothin'." 

Perhaps  not,  but  I  felt  more  than  repaid  in 
seeing  the  orchard  look  shipshape  instead  of 
like  a  neglected  cemetery. 

Earlier  in  the  season  I  had  taken  samples 
from  a  five-acre  strip  of  damp,  low-lying  land 
at  the  foot  of  the  hill  which  was  fairly  well 
drained,  and  sent  them  to  the  school  for 
analysis.  I  received  a  report  advising  me  to 
plant  potatoes  there  and  a  formula  for  the  best 
fertilizer  to  use.  Here  again  it  didn't  take  a 
man  bred  on  a  farm  to  carry  out  the  simple 
instructions.  I  had  the  field  plowed  as  soon 
as  the  frost  was  out  of  the  ground,  applied  my 
fertilizer  of  acid  phosphate,  kainit  and  nitrate 
of  soda — so  many  pounds  to  the  acre — and  har- 
rowed it  in.  It  didn't  require  even  ordinary 
intelligence  to  have  this  done  or  to  purchase 
Early  Norwood,  New  Queen  and  Green 
Mountain  seed  and  plant  them  in  rows  three 
feet  apart  and  in  sets  fifteen  inches  apart. 
Hadley  and  I  did  the  work — work  that  any 
day  laborer  was  capable  of  doing.  I  reserved 
a  small  strip  for  the  planting  of  Early  Horn 


SPRING  125 

carrots,  Market  Model  parsnips,  Edmands 
beets  and  Early  Milan  turnips.  These  names 
didn't  mean  anything  to  me,  and  I  didn't  care 
if  they  didn't.  Before  the  end  of  the  season 
however  I  wished  I  had  reserved  an  even 
larger  strip  for  these  things.  I  never  ate  such 
vegetables  in  my  life. 

I  plowed  up  about  an  acre  back  of  the  barn 
for  the  garden  and  emptied  upon  this  the  ma- 
nure from  the  cow  barn,  working  it  in  well. 
Then  I  harrowed  the  ground  until  it  was  pul- 
verized almost  as  fine  as  dust.  According  to 
the  Professor  not  half  time  enough  is  devoted 
by  the  average  New  England  farmer  to  the 
preparation  of  the  soil  for  his  seed.  Often- 
times he  is  content  with  a  shallow  plowing  and 
a  single  harrowing.  I  noticed  that  Dardoni 
and  Tony  however  knew  by  instinct  enough  to 
work  their  soil  thoroughly.  They  depended  a 
great  deal  on  hand  labor,  because  for  one  rea- 
son they  could  secure  help  cheap.  Newcomers 
were  glad  enough  to  work  for  them  for  the  ex- 
perience, and  the  chance  it  gave  them  to  look 
around  for  places  of  their  own.  However,  the 
result  was  the  same  and  they  did  their  work 
thoroughly.  I  planted  about  one-fourth  of 
this  garden  to  peas  in  successive  sowings. 


126  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Here  was  another  simple  and  obvious  advan- 
tage which  I  found  my  neighbors  until  now 
had  neglected.  They  sowed  perhaps  an  early 
and  late  crop  of  peas  and  corn  but  it  never  oc- 
curred to  them  to  make  three  or  four  plantings 
and  many  of  them  didn't  even  make  two. 
When  peas  and  corn  were  ripe  everyone  had 
peas  and  corn  but  in  the  intervals  no  one  ex- 
cept Dardoni  and  his  fellows  had  them  at  all. 
They  were  therefore  either  scarce  or  a  drug  on 
the  market.  Under  advice  I  used  Buttons, 
with  a  few  Dwarf  Champions. 

Another  quarter  of  the  garden  I  planted  to 
beans — some  string  beans — Plentifuls  and  Val- 
enties — some  wax  and  Lima  beans  and  a  large 
patch  of  white  pea  beans  for  winter. 

Another  quarter  of  the  patch  I  put  into 
sweet  corn,  using  for  the  early  varieties  Early 
Cory  and  Peep  o'  Day;  for  medium  earlies 
Crosby,  and  for  late  corn  Country  Gentleman. 
Among  these  I  put  in  a  few  squash  seeds, 
Crooknecks  and  Hubbards. 

The  last  quarter  I  used  for  cucumbers,  cab- 
bage, tomatoes  and  small  stuff,  such  as  lettuce, 
pepper  grass,  radishes,  Swiss  chard,  and  beets. 

Now  to  get  all  this  done  within  the  space  of 
a  few  weeks  required  hard  work.  I  was  up  at 


SPRING  127 

half  past  four  and  in  the  field  by  half  past  five. 
With  an  hour  out  at  noon  I  was  in  the  field 
steadily  until  six  o'clock.  Then  I  ate  supper 
and  was  in  bed  by  eight-thirty  so  dog-tired  I 
could  hardly  get  undressed.  And  yet  I  woke 
up  at  daylight  the  next  morning  completely 
rested  and  eager  to  be  at  it  again.  This  was 
the  kind  of  hard  work  that  leaves  no  after  ef- 
fects. I  continued  to  employ  Hadley,  but  with- 
out boasting  I  honestly  believe  I  accomplished 
each  day  four  times  as  much  as  he  did.  I 
didn't  do  this  by  unusual  exertion,  but  merely 
by  keeping  steadily  at  it  and  planning  the  work 
in  a  businesslike  way.  In  my  thought  I  kept 
one  step  ahead  of  my  hands  while  he  always 
kept  one  step  behind  and  had  to  wait  for  his 
head  to  catch  up  with  him. 

I  never  felt  more  alert  in  body  and  mind  than 
I  did  this  spring.  I  was  used  to  physical  la- 
bor, but  I  found  myself  responding  with  even 
greater  vigor  now  than  when  I  was  younger 
and  digging  for  the  subway  as  a  day  laborer. 
For  one  thing  I  had  none  of  the  mental  strain 
with  which  I  was  burdened  then.  Of  course 
I  was  in  a  far  better  position  financially  and 
everything  was  going  well  with  my  own. 
Dick  was  making  good  and  the  kiddies  were 


128  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

as  rosy  and  plump  as  fall  apples.  Ruth,  too, 
was  happier  than  I  had  ever  seen  her,  so  that 
while  I  took  this  new  work  seriously  it  was 
with  a  light-hearted  seriousness  that  added  to 
the  zest  of  life. 

In  the  meantime  we  were  holding  a  meeting 
of  the  Pioneers  every  two  weeks  in  order  that 
interest  might  not  flag,  and  to  discuss  any  dif- 
ficulties that  arose.  These  gatherings  were  in- 
formal, and  as  time  went  on  had  the  effect  of 
binding  us  together  into  one  big  family.  Some- 
times I  spoke  and  sometimes  Holt  spoke,  and 
twice  we  had  a  man  down  from  the  school. 
So  far  as  it  was  possible  we  tried  to  prod  up 
everyone's  pride.  We  told  them  that  as  de- 
scendants of  the  people  who  founded  this  na- 
tion we  had  a  certain  responsibility  of  blood. 
We  were  still  the  backbone  of  this  nation,  but 
this  inheritance  didn't  amount  to  anything  un- 
less we  lived  up  to  it.  We  tried  to  impress 
everyone  with  the  fact  that  other  pioneers  were 
coming  in  (and  they  saw  this  for  themselves) 
and  that  if  we  meant  to  retain  our  title  and 
position  it  must  be  by  proving  ourselves  worthy 
of  it.  We  avoided  carefully  anything  which 
might  stir  up  class  hatred. 

'The  race  is  open  to  all,"  said  Holt.     "It's 


SPRING  129 

right  that  it  should  be.  A  man  wouldn't  have 
much  of  a  horse  race  if  he  only  allowed  his 
own  horses  to  enter — horses  he  was  sure  of. 
A  victory  wouldn't  mean  anything.  It  would 
be  like  betting  with  yourself.  It's  only  in  the 
free-for-all  that  you  get  a  real  race  and  a  real 
victory.  We've  made  a  good  start  and  now 
all  we  have  to  do  is  to  sit  tight  and  drive  hard." 

Holt  had  a  catchy  way  of  talking  and  al- 
ways succeeded  in  putting  the  crowd  into  good 
humor  and  also  in  throwing  a  glamour  of  ro- 
mance over  everything.  We  couldn't  have  had 
a  better  man. 

But  as  I  said,  the  greatest  good  of  these 
meetings  came  in  the  community  idea  which 
was  fostered.  Associating  here  week  after 
week  for  a  common  purpose  we  began  to 
feel  friendly  and  intimate  with  one  another. 
Farmers  are  naturally  an  independent  lot  and 
the  worse  farmers  they  are  the  more  independ- 
ent they  are  apt  to  be.  Lack  of  success  in- 
stead of  humbling  them  makes  them  even 
cockier,  as  it  does  for  that  matter  with  people 
in  any  walk  of  life  who  have  any  backbone. 
They  find  plenty  of  excuse  for  their  failure 
outside  themselves.  Newspapers  and  muck- 
raking magazine  articles  and  politicians  fur- 


130  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

nish  them  with  arguments  enough  to  explain 
how  they  are  being  robbed  and  abused.  These 
things  sink  in  deep  among  farmers  when  they 
sink  in  at  all,  because  they  have  time  to  think 
them  over  and  digest  them.  But  it  sinks  into 
them  as  individuals  and  not  as  a  body.  The 
result  is  that  not  only  do  they  become  sus- 
picious of  the  outside  world  but  suspicious  of 
one  another.  It  makes  them  even  more  pro- 
nounced separate  units.  Up  to  a  certain  point 
this  is  not  only  a  good  thing  but  the  best  pos- 
sible thing.  It  has  preserved  their  individu- 
ality. Organization  after  organization  has 
tried  to  herd  them  together  and  reduce  them 
to  a  mere  class  so  as  to  drive  them  in  one 
direction  for  their  own  selfish  ends,  but  hap- 
pily without  result.  They  won't  be  driven. 
Even  the  organizations  which  have  had  a  less 
sordid  interest  in  the  task  have  failed  to  hold 
them  together  for  any  length  of  time,  which 
in  my  opinion  has  saved  them  from  being  swal- 
lowed up. 

But  this  independence  is  carried  to  extremes 
in  the  smaller  communities  and  it  was  so  in 
our  town.  Every  man  was  suspicious  of  his 
neighbor.  Though  engaged  in  the  same 
work  and  with  many  interests  in  common  every 


SPRING  131 

man  felt  himself  a  competitor,  not  with  the  out- 
side world,  but  with  his  nearest  neighbor. 
They  wouldn't  pull  together  on  anything. 

We  didn't  overcome  this  feeling  in  a  minute 
but  we  did  accomplish  a  lot  towards  it  even 
during  this  first  summer.  In  a  way  this  prize 
system  might  be  expected  to  increase  individual 
competition,  but  even  to  the  end  of  winning  the 
prizes  we  forced  everyone  to  work  together 
which  more  than  made  up. 

It  wasn't  long  before  we  all  of  us  realized 
that  we  had  opened  up  a  field  even  larger  than 
any  of  us  had  dreamed.  When  we  saw  almost 
two  hundred  acres  spring  to  life  as  a  result 
of  our  initial  effort ;  as  we  saw  front  dooryards 
blossom  with  flower  gardens  and  back  door- 
yards  become  alive  with  truck  gardens;  as  we 
saw  orchard  after  orchard,  which  until  now  had 
been  about  as  sightly  as  a  patch  of  dead  hem- 
locks, step  forth  trim  and  neat  and  full,  not  of 
dead  hopes,  but  of  big  promise ;  as  we  noted  the 
absence  of  village  loafers  and  grocery  store 
hangers-on,  we  caught  an  inkling  of  what  a 
power  we  had  set  in  motion.  And  the  joy  of  it 
came  in  the  realization  that  this  was  no  new 
and  imported  power,  but  native  energy  \vhich 
all  the  while  had  been  here  latent.  These 


I32  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

acres,  this  labor  which  had  been  lying  idle,  was 
now  waking  up.  It  represented  thousands  of 
dollars  when  aroused  and  only  so  many  cents 
when  dormant.  A  man  couldn't  have  come  in 
here  and  bought  this  plant — houses,  barns, 
fields,  stock,  men,  for  much  less  than  a  million 
dollars  at  any  time,  and  yet  it  hadn't  been 
worth  to  those  who  possessed  it  what  it  was 
taxed.  Quick  with  life  as  it  was  now  it  was 
coming  to  its  own. 


CHAPTER  X 

RESULTS 

From  the  moment  my  seeds  began  to  show 
in  tiny  sprouts  above  the  ground  until  the  full 
grown  produce  was  safely  garnered,  I  lived 
with  a  hoe  in  my  hands.  Much  to  Hadley's 
disgust  I  also  kept  a  hoe  in  his  hands  most  of 
the  time.  I  didn't  allow  a  weed  either  in  my 
truck  garden  or  my  potato  patch  ever  to  get 
more  than  two  inches  high.  Instead  of  hoe- 
ing once  I  hoed  a  half  dozen  times.  The  ad- 
vantage of  this  is  not  so  much  in  keeping  down 
the  weeds  as  it  is  in  stirring  up  the  soil  so  that 
the  earth  keeps  fresh  and  alive  and  porous. 
Hadley  was  disgusted. 

"Lawd-a-mighty,"  he  exclaimed,  as  we 
started  for  the  potato  patch  with  hoes  over 
our  shoulders  for  the  fourth  cultivation,  "ye'll 
hoe  your  stuff  to  death." 

"You  wait  and  see  the  results,"  I  said. 

"Ye  b'lieve  every  darn  thing  them  school 
teachers  tell  ye?" 

133 


134  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Pretty  nearly,"  I  said. 

"It's  all  right  for  them  to  preach,"  he  said, 
"but  I'll  bet  a  dollar  to  a  doughnut  thet  they'd 
quit  preachin'  hoein'  mighty  quick  if  ye  gave 
them  this  five  acre  patch  to  hoe  theirselves." 

But  I  was  satisfied  with  results  at  the  end 
of  the  first  month.  No  one  could  ask  for  har- 
dier looking  plants  than  I  had.  But  Hadley 
was  not  convinced  even  with  this  visible  proof. 

"They've  grown  spite  of  ye,"  he  said.  "Any- 
how the  tarnation  bugs  will  eat  'em  up  afore 
you're  through.  Always  do." 

Doubtless  they  would  if  I  had  given  my  per- 
mission, but  when  I  wasn't  hoeing  I  was  spray- 
ing with  Paris  Green.  More  than  this  I  went 
around  with  a  tin  can  and  knocked  off  into  this 
all  those  bugs  which  did  succeed  in  reaching 
maturity.  A  couple  of  sprayings  a  season  was 
the  most  anyone  around  here  ever  did.  So 
long  as  the  bugs  were  kept  down  enough  not 
actually  to  kill  the  plants  most  people  here- 
about were  satisfied.  I  don't  believe  an  even 
hundred  of  the  pests  succeeded  in  getting  a 
square  meal  off  my  potatoes. 

Now  in  all  this  I  insist,  and  it's  evident  on 
the  face  of  it,  that  such  attention  didn't  imply 
on  my  part  any  scientific  knowledge  of  farm- 


RESULTS  135 

ing.  I  did  what  I  was  told  to  do  and  did  it 
thoroughly.  I  did  what  it  seems  to  me  I  should 
have  known  enough  to  do  even  if  I  hadn't  been 
told.  You  can't  eat  your  cake  and  have  it, 
too;  you  can't  let  bugs  eat  your  potatoes  and 
have  your  potatoes,  too.  It  was  queer  sort  of 
reasoning  that  until  now  had  convinced  my 
neighbors  that  this  was  possible.  They  had 
almost  fatalistic  theories  about  farming.  They 
seemed  to  think  that  the  most  any  man  could 
do  was  to  plant  his  seed  and  then  trust  to  Provi- 
dence for  what  might  result.  This  pious  faith 
in  the  bounty  of  the  Almighty  was  fundamen- 
tally of  course  merely  an  unconscious  excuse 
for  their  own  laziness,  but  it  seems  to  me  it 
really  must  have  been  at  the  root  of  their 
shiftlessness — an  inheritance  perhaps.  Hadley 
was  a  fine  example  of  it.  I  gave  up  early  in 
the  season  trying  to  inspire  him  even  with  the 
help  of  the  prizes.  He  did  plant  a  few  hills 
of  corn  but  he  refused  to  hoe  them  more  than 
once. 

Now  what  I  did  myself,  a  large  part  of  my 
neighbors  were  also  doing  in  a  more  or  less 
earnest  way.  The  young  men  I  found  were 
doing  more  than  the  old  men.  The  latter  had 
taken  advice  in  the  matter  of  fertilizers  and 


136  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

seeds  but  it  came  hard  to  them  to  give  the 
later  attention  to  their  crops  that  I  did.  How- 
ever it  was  possible  to  see  a  general  and  notable 
improvement  even  in  this.  The  semi-monthly 
meetings  did  much  to  spur  them  on  and  the  no- 
ticeable results  which  followed  their  efforts 
also  did  something  more.  Some  of  them  re- 
mained skeptical,  but  both  Holt  and  myself  in- 
sisted that  they  must  keep  at  it  until  the  end 
of  the  season.  We  never  missed  a  chance  to 
dangle  before  their  eyes  the  prize  money.  Holt 
did  one  clever  thing  that  had  a  very  good  ef- 
fect. He  secured  one  hundred  crisp  new  dol- 
lar bills  and  kept  them  displayed  in  the  window' 
of  Moulton's  grocery  store  with  a  sign  over 
them  which  read : 

"ONLY  ONE  OF  THE  TEN  PRIZES." 

The  display  of  so  much  money  caught  the 
eye  of  everyone  who  passed.  More  than  that 
about  everyone  in  town  who  was  competing 
went  down  and  had  a  look  at  it  every  so  often. 
It  acted  like  a  tonic  to  many  a  man  who  was 
getting  disheartened  by  the  amount  of  labor  in- 
volved in  the  new  system. 

Holt  and  I  made  a  rough  estimate  of  the 


RESULTS  137 

land  now  under  cultivation  that  last  year  was 
idle  and  figured  that  it  amounted  to  about  one 
hundred  and  eighty  acres.  In  addition  to  this 
there  was  of  course  the  land  that  was  always 
farmed  to  a  more  or  less  extent  amounting  to 
some  two  hundred  acres  more.  Out  of  this 
last  lot  there  wasn't  an  acre  that  didn't  show 
improvement  over  the  year  before. 

The  new  hundred  and  eighty  acres  counted 
for  a  lot  more  in  value  than  shows  in  the  mere 
statement,  because  it  included  gardens  for 
nearly  everyone  in  the  village  and  this  meant 
an  actual  saving  in  cash  for  every  householder 
from  the  moment  the  produce  began  to  mature. 
Moulton  noted  the  effect  of  this  when  as  usual 
he  started  to  bring  in  early  vegetables  from 
the  city  market.  He  had  all  he  could  do  to 
get  rid  of  the  first  lot  and  after  that  gave  it 
up.  No  one  wanted  city  vegetables  with  the 
prospect  ahead  of  vegetables  of  their  own. 
Martin,  the  local  butcher,  also  noticed  the  ef- 
fect in  a  way  he  didn't  like.  He  was  the  only 
man  in  the  village  who  opposed  us  and  he  can't 
be  blamed,  for  his  meat  sales  began  to  fall  off 
in  June  and  dropped  fifty  per  cent,  during  July 
and  August.  With  green  peas  to  be  had  for 
the  picking,  followed  by  string  beans,  new  po- 


138  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

tatoes,  green  corn,  turnips,  parsnips,  beets, 
shell  beans  and  what  not,  most  people  thought 
twice  before  paying  him  forty  cents  a  pound 
for  rump  steak.  Personally  I'd  like  to  have 
seen  him  put  out  of  business,  for  he  was  a  rob- 
ber if  ever  there  was  one.  He  had  set  me  to 
wondering  a  long  while  before  this  why  it 
wasn't  possible  for  us  to  raise  our  own  meat. 
With  plenty  of  corn  and  hay  upon  which  to 
feed- our  cattle,  with  grazing  ground  for  sheep, 
with  practically  everyone  able  to  keep  his  own 
pig  on  ordinary  waste  I  didn't  see  any  reason 
why  in  the  end  we  shouldn't  make  use  of  this 
opportunity.  Our  forefathers  raised  whatever 
meat  they  needed  and  I  believed  we  could  do  it 
to-day.  This  was  one  of  the  things  I  resolved 
to  bring  up  at  one  of  the  fall  meetings. 

But  when  crops  began  to  mature  we  were 
confronted  with  another  and  more  urgent 
problem.  Just  as  soon  as  the  green  peas  be- 
gan to  come  along  we  realized  that  we  were 
face  to  face  with  the  problem  of  distribution. 
We  had  killed  the  local  market,  which  was  de- 
cidedly a  good  thing.  In  one  sense  we  hadn't 
killed  it,  for  now  every  man  was  supplying 
himself,  but  we  had  killed  it  for  our  surplus. 
It  didn't  take  me  long  to  see  that  this  would 


RESULTS  139 

be  wasted,  for  all  that  a  majority  of  the  in- 
dividuals themselves  might  do.  The  farmers 
were  helpless  partly  because  they  had  no  selling 
knowledge  and  partly  because  it  was  almost 
impossible  for  them  to  get  produce  to  the  mar- 
ket and  sell  at  a  profit  in  small  lots.  Holt  and 
I  made  a  round  of  the  commission  merchants 
in  town  and  the  very  best  we  could  do  with 
any  of  them  was  at  a  price  forty  per  cent,  be- 
low retail.  We  figured  that  transportation 
would  eat  up  another  ten  per  cent,  which  left 
the  man  \vho  raised  the  crop  some  fifty  per 
cent.  This  was  dead  wrong  on  the  face  of 
it,  but  we  didn't  have  any  time  to  argue  the 
point  and  it  wouldn't  have  done  us  any  good 
if  we  had.  As  we  wrere  now  situated,  fifty 
per  cent,  was  better  than  nothing.  However 
this  opened  my  eyes  to  some  of  the  reasons  why 
in  the  suburbs  we  couldn't  make  both  ends 
meet. 

I  called  a  special  meeting  of  the  club  and  told 
the  members  what  I  had  learned  and  outlined 
the  plan  Holt  and  I  had  devised  to  save  what 
we  could.  The  situation  had  come  unexpect- 
edly and  was  due  of  course  to  our  ignorance. 
We  didn't  realize  it  at  the  time  but  as  it  hap- 
pened this  crisis  was  the  best  thing  that  could 


140  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

have  come  about.  It  forced  us  on  the  spur 
of  the  moment  and  at  the  psychological  mo- 
ment into  a  plan  that  promised  to  develop  big 
things  in  the  end;  the  cooperative  selling  plan. 
I  proposed  that  every  member  of  the  club 
should  gather  early  each  morning  such  things 
as  were  fit  for  the  market  over  what  he  couldn't 
use  himself  and  bring  them  to  my  barn.  There 
the  produce  would  be  measured  and  sorted  and 
each  man  given  a  credit  slip.  A  committee 
of  three  was  to  be  appointed  by  the  club  to  over- 
see without  pay  this  work  for  a  week.  The 
committee  would  hire  a  team  to  transport  the 
goods  to  the  early  train  which  left  at  five  fif- 
teen. At  the  end  of  each  week  an  accounting 
would  be  made,  the  cost  of  transportation  de- 
ducted and  profits  distributed  pro  rata.  I  of- 
fered to  look  after  the  bookkeeping  myself  if 
the  club  so  desired  and  at  the  next  meeting  this 
task  was  delegated  to  me. 

Now  it  is  possible  that  in  advance  of  the 
present  urgent  situation  which  demanded  that 
they  accept  this  or  nothing,  a  minority  at  least 
might  have  viewed  this  scheme  with  suspicion. 
They  were  not  used  to  doing  things  in  a  body 
and  the  novelty  of  it,  like  all  novelties,  might 
have  frightened  them.  As  it  was,  the  plan 


RESULTS  141 

was  received  with  instant  enthusiasm  and 
when  put  to  a  vote  carried  without  a  single 
dissenting  voice.  Anyway  if  a  man  disap- 
proved all  he  had  to  do  was  not  to  bring  in  his 
produce.  The  action  of  the  club  didn't  bind 
a  man  to  anything  except  to  abide  by  results  if 
he  chose  to  contribute  his  stuff. 

We  appointed  three  men  to  appear  at  my 
barn  at  four  o'clock  the  next  morning.  They 
turned  up  on  time  and  by  four-fifteen  the 
produce  began  to  arrive.  Everyone  brought 
what  he  had,  whether  it  was  a  bushel  of  sweet 
corn,  a  peck  of  beans,  a  dozen  heads  of  lettuce, 
a  half  dozen  cucumbers  or  a  barrel  of  apples 
or  potatoes.  In  most  cases  the  individual  lots 
didn't  amount  to  much  but  collectively  we  made 
a  good  showing  that  first  morning.  We  had 
enough  to  fill  a  two  horse  load.  I  went  to  the 
station  and  supervised  the  loading  myself  and 
then  went  on  to  the  market  with  it.  Barnes, 
the  commission  man,  looked  it  over  and  ad- 
mitted that  he  was  well  pleased  on  his  part  with 
the  venture.  At  the  end  of  the  first  week  I 
received  a  check  for  four  hundred  and  eighty- 
three  dollars  and  sixty-five  cents — not  in  itself 
a  large  amount  or  as  much  as  it  should  have 
been,  but  when  considered  as  money,  a  large 


142 


NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 


per  cent,  of  which  would  otherwise  have  gone 
to  waste,  a  creditable  showing. 

And  really  the  working  out  of  the  scheme 
as  it  continued  from  week  to  week  was  won- 
derfully simple.  There  was  nothing  either  dif- 
ficult or  complicated  about  it.  The  three  men 
appointed  every  week  gave  about  two  hours 
of  their  time  for  six  days  which  in  no  way 
interfered  with  their  farm  duties.  They  all 
looked  upon  their  selection  as  an  honor  and 
rather  enjoyed  their  position. 

Nor  was  my  part  of  it  burdensome.  I  re- 
ceived an  itemized  accounting  from  Barnes  and 
had  nothing  to  do  but  divide  these  items  as 
the  dated  credit  slips  were  produced.  I  didn't 
even  have  to  do  that,  for  Ruth  did  the  figuring 
herself.  Before  the  end  of  the  season  we 
found  we  had  handled  thirty-eight  hundred 
dollars,  but  this  included  the  apple  and  potato 
crop  which  went  through  us.  And  there 
wasn't  a  single  kick  or  complaint  heard  during 
the  whole  business. 

In  the  meantime,  as  the  end  of  the  season 
approached,  the  matter  of  the  prize  distribu- 
tion loomed  big.  I  wanted  to  make  the  most 
of  that  event.  I  wanted  it  to  be  a  big  spec- 
tacular finish  that  would  cling  in  the  minds 


RESULTS  143 

of  all  during  the  ensuing  winter.  The  com- 
mittee held  several  meetings  to  discuss  the  best 
way  of  doing  this  and  we  finally  hit  upon 
the  idea  of  an  old-time  country  fair.  There 
hadn't  been  one  in  town  for  twenty  years  be- 
cause the  last  ones  held  had  degenerated  into 
nothing  but  two-cent  horse  races  in  which  the 
prizes  had  all  been  carried  off  by  semi-profes- 
sionals. The  chief  objection  to  the  plan  was 
the  lack  of  fair  grounds.  The  old  society  had 
gone  into  bankruptcy  and  sold  off  what  prop- 
erty it  had  and  the  grounds  had  since  then 
grown  up  to  scrub  pine.  Ruth  solved  the  diffi- 
culty by  suggesting  that  we  go  back  again  to 
the  early  days  for  our  idea.  Originally  the 
fairs  were  held  on  the  village  green.  In  fact, 
in  parts  of  New  England  they  still  are  to- 
day. Her  idea  was  to  revive  this  custom  in 
our  town. 

The  idea  had  several  advantages,  not  the 
least  of  which  was  that  it  incurred  no  expense, 
and  met  with  instant  approval.  We  appointed 
a  committee  to  look  after  the  details,  a  second 
committee  to  arrange  a  field  day  for  the  young- 
sters, and  a  third  committee  with  Ruth  at  its 
head  to  arrange  some  sort  of  entertainment  for 
the  women. 


144  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"You  mustn't  leave  them  out,"  Ruth  insisted. 
"They  play  a  more  important  part  in  this  work 
than  you  imagine." 

We  had  arranged  with  the  Agricultural 
School  to  send  down  men  to  act  as  judges  so 
that  everything  should  be  judged  impartially. 
A  man  had  come  down  just  before  the  haying 
season  and  had  overseen  the  weighing  on  the 
town  scales  of  all  hay  entered  for  the  compe- 
tition. Quality  and  quantity  were  the  two 
things  taken  into  account  for  the  best  crop  on 
land  already  used  for  that  purpose,  while  the 
prize  for  the  best  crop  on  reclaimed  land  re- 
quired a  somewhat  nicer  judgment.  The  na- 
ture of  the  land  here  had  to  be  considered. 
When  the  expert  had  completed  his  work  he 
made  his  report  and  placed  it  in  a  sealed  en- 
velope which  was  not  to  be  opened  until  the 
public  award. 

This  same  method  was  used  in  making  the 
awards  for  the  most  notable  improvement  in 
orchards,  for  the  best  corn  crop  and  the  best 
potato  crop.  As  for  the  other  prizes  the  com- 
mittee itself  acted  as  judges.  The  results  here 
were  a  matter  of  self-evident  facts.  In  the 
live  stock  competition  each  man  was  required 
to  show  a  receipted  bill  for  all  money  expended 


RESULTS  145 

and  a  record  of  some  sort  for  all  money  re- 
ceived. The  garden  competition  had  to  be 
judged  in  a  more  general  way,  as  it  was  ob- 
served by  the  committee  during  the  entire 
season.  I  had  put  a  good  deal  of  time  into 
this  myself  and  it  had  been  a  genuine  pleasure. 
There  was  hardly  a  family  in  the  village  who 
didn't  have  a  garden  of  some  sort  that  year, 
for  even  those  who  didn't  intend  to  compete 
caught  the  contagion  and  planted  something. 
I  wish  there  had  been  some  way  of  computing 
the  saving  in  cash  that  resulted  from  this  alone. 
It  certainly  amounted  to  a  good  many  times 
the  money  which  had  inspired  the  movement. 
It  seems  almost  impossible  of  belief  that  to 
many  residents  of  this  country  village  the  rais- 
ing of  their  own  green  stuff  was  a  decided 
novelty.  But  such  is  the  fact.  With  a  man 
coming  daily  to  the  door,  as  until  this  season 
Tony  and  others  had  done,  with  peas,  lettuce, 
corn,  cucumbers  and  what  not,  people  had 
bought  of  him  as  a  matter  of  convenience.  It 
had  cost  them  only  a  little  at  a  time  and  they 
hadn't  realized  to  how  much  the  sum  total 
amounted. 

I  know  that  Ruth  and  I  found  a  big  differ- 
ence in  our  household  expenses  once  the  garden 


146  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

began  to  bear.  Not  only  this  but  we  did  away 
with  meat  almost  entirely  and  never  lived  so 
well  in  our  lives.  In  addition  to  what  I  used 
myself  I  loaded  down  Dick's  machine  every 
morning  with  such  stuff  as  couldn't  be  put 
away  for  winter  use,  to  be  distributed  among 
members  of  the  gang — among  families  with 
children  or  those  temporarily  in  hard  luck 
through  sickness.  Moulton  was  certainly  mis- 
taken when  he  had  prophesied  that  it  would 
cost  me  more  to  raise  than  buy  my  own  vege- 
tables. But  he  hadn't  planned  on  any  such 
modern  methods  as  I  and  the  whole  village 
used  that  season. 

As  the  day  for  the  fair  grew  nearer  the 
town  became  on  edge  with  excitement.  Here 
was  a  holiday  which  appealed  to  everyone, 
whether  farmer  or  not.  It  brought  the  whole 
village  together  as  a  unit.  I  was  surprised  to 
find  how  much  local  spirit  really  existed  be- 
low all  the  apparent  indifference.  I  found 
there  wasn't  a  man  or  woman  who  didn't  have 
some  town  pride,  however  slight.  The  trouble 
was  that  they  seldom  had  an  opportunity  to 
express  it.  Holt  kept  up  a  running  fire  of  com- 
ment in  the  local  paper,  which  was  glad  to  give 


RESULTS  147 

us  all  the  space  we  wished.  It  made  the  most 
readable  and  inexpensive  copy  they  had  re- 
ceived for  a  long  time.  We  also  got  out  post- 
ers and  distributed  them  among  the  neighbor- 
ing towns,  bidding  everyone  come  as  guests  of 
the  village.  Every  merchant  decorated  his 
store  a  week  in  advance  and  the  Woodmen's 
band  in  anticipation  of  the  event  practiced  new 
pieces  every  night. 

Ruth  secured  the  town  hall  for  the  women 
and  arranged  there  for  an  exhibition  of  New 
England  cooking,  preserving  and  needle  work, 
which  instantly  gave  the  women  an  active  in- 
terest in  the  undertaking.  She  also  arranged 
to"  serve  here  a  free  lunch  of  coffee,  sandwiches 
and  cakes  to  out-of-town  visitors.  Her  com- 
mittee decorated  the  interior  of  the  old  build- 
ing with  wild  flowers  and  flowers  from  the 
home  gardens,  with  a  background  of  ever- 
greens gathered  by  the  small  boys. 

We  received  requests  for  street  privileges 
from  a  number  of  fakirs  and  sold  these  for 
enough  to  purchase  settees  to  go  around  the 
band  stand.  We  used  some  care  however  in 
giving  out  our  permits  and  barred  all  gam- 
bles of  whatever  kind.  About  a  dozen  came 
into  town  the  day  before  and  erected  their 


148  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

booths  which  gave  the  village  still  more  of  a 
holiday  aspect.  That  night  there  wasn't  a  live- 
lier village  in  the  State.  It  was  so  full  of  an- 
ticipation that  I  don't  believe  more  than  half 
the  population  got  their  full  night's  sleep  for  the 
first  time  in  twenty  years. 

"Are  we  dead  yet?"  demanded  Holt  of  Ruth 
as  he  prepared  to  leave  us  long  after  midnight 
and  after  being  up  since  four  A.  M. 

"Some  of  you  will  be  if  you  don't  go  right 
home  this  minute  and  get  some  sleep,"  she  an- 
swered. 


CHAPTER  XI 

A   GREAT   DAY 

The  morning  of  October  first  dawned  cool 
and  clear  with  just  frost  enough  in  the  air  to 
make  everyone  feel  as  fit  as  a  fighting  cock. 
As  early  as  seven  o'clock  carriage  loads  of  peo- 
ple passed  my  house  from  the  neighboring  vil- 
lages. Old  men  and  young  came,  women  and 
children,  glad  of  an  excuse  no  matter  how  slight 
to  journey  to  a  common  meeting  place  and 
see  and  be  seen.  They  came  from  as  far 
away  as  twenty  miles  and  people  who  had 
not  met  for  ten  years  took  this  opportunity 
to  visit  with  one  another.  Former  residents, 
friends  of  present  residents  and  total  strangers 
poured  into  town,  obeying  the  instinct  to  herd 
together  for  a  day.  The  whole  village  kept 
open  house  and  so  far  as  it  was  possible  we 
tried  to  have  everything  free — to  act  as  a  town 
as  hosts.  I  for  my  part  extended  a  general 
invitation  to  the  gang  and  all  my  old  friends 
from  Little  Italy  and  spread  a  big  table  in  the 

149 


150  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

barn  for  them  because  there  wasn't  room  in 
the  house.  As  many  as  seventy-five  women 
and  children  came  in  the  afternoon,  while  that 
evening  about  the  whole  gang  came  along. 
They  pretty  nearly  ate  us  out  of  house  and  home 
but  I  had  a  big  bonfire  built  in  the  yard  and  in 
this  they  roasted  apples  and  potatoes  when 
everything  else  was  gone. 

The  prize  award  was  set  for  eleven  o'clock 
and  for  an  hour  before  the  band  gave  a  con- 
cert. At  the  conclusion  of  this  I  estimated 
that  fully  nine  hundred  people  were  gathered 
around  the  band  stand.  It  was  as  intense  and 
excited  a  gathering  as  you  ever  saw.  Not  an 
inkling  of  who  had  won  the  prizes  leaked  out 
although  in  most  cases  the  general  discussion 
and  known  facts  had  narrowed  the  possibilities 
down  to  a  half  dozen  in  each  class.  I  myself 
didn't  know  the  winners  except  in  the  cases 
where  I  acted  as  judge.  When  the  band  fin- 
ished its  programme  with  "America"  and  Holt 
and  the  committee  and  the  judges  from  the 
Agricultural  School  who  were  present  as 
guests,  and  myself  stepped  to  the  platform  you 
could  have  heard  a  pin  drop.  As  president  of 
the  club  it  was  my  duty  to  make  a  brief  speech 
and  in  this  I  outlined  for  the  benefit  of  stran- 


A  GREAT  DAY  151 

gers  present  the  object  of  the  club,  the  money 
that  had  been  offered,  what  had  been  accom- 
plished and  on  what  basis  the  awards  were  to 
be  made. 

"It  seems  to  me,"  I  said  at  the  end,  "that 
every  man  and  woman  and  boy  who  is  a  mem- 
ber of  this  club  ought  to  feel  that  he  has  won 
something  whether  he  draws  a  money  prize  or 
not." 

This  was  greeted  with  noisy  cheering  which 
it  did  my  heart  good  to  hear. 

"Every  one  of  you  who  planted  a  seed  and 
cared  for  it  has  reaped  the  reward  of  seeing 
it  multiply  at  a  rate  possible  in  no  other  busi- 
ness. Nature  is  the  grand  prize  giver. 
Every  farmer  ought  to  consider  himself  a  part- 
ner with  Nature — with  God.  Men  give  you  for 
the  use  of  a  dollar  for  one  year  four  cents,  pos- 
sibly five  or  six  cents ;  Nature  gives  us  for  a  dol- 
lar's worth  of  seed  as  high  as  a  thousand  and 
two  thousand  per  cent.  There  isn't  a  family 
in  this  village  who  planted  a  garden  last  spring 
who  hasn't  been  paid  by  Nature  in  produce 
representing  good  hard  cash  the  wages  of  a 
skilled  artisan.  We've  had  all  we  wanted  to 
eat,  some  of  us  have  put  away  enough  for  the 
winter  and  over  and  above  that  we  have  sold 


152  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

in  garden  stuff  alone  thirty-eight  hundred  dol- 
lars' worth.  And  that  doesn't  represent  the 
sum  total  of  our  products  by  a  good  deal.  So 
I  insist  that  we've  all  won  richer  prizes  than 
any  offered  here  to-day.  And  with  the  knowl- 
edge we've  gained  this  year  I  look  to  see  this 
result  doubled  next  year.  I  look  to  see  our 
farms  grow  better  and  better  with  good  care ;  I 
look  to  see  our  orchards  improve ;  I  look  to  see 
us  raise  all  our  own  beef  and  mutton  and  pork 
and  the  grain  to  feed  the  stock  upon.  I  look 
to  see  us  do  all  our  hardy  ancestors  did  and 
with  opportunities  such  as  they  never  dreamed 
of  wax  so  prosperous  that  men  in  the  business 
world  outside  will  be  forced  to  reckon  with  us 
and  give  us  the  position  that  is  our  right — 
abreast  of  the  leaders  in  the  productive  enter- 
prises of  the  world.  This  bit  of  extra  money 
here,  in  spite  of  all  that  Mr.  Holt  would  have 
us  believe,  doesn't  represent  our  goal.  We've 
attained  that  already,  and  this  is  only  just  so 
much  more  pin  money.  We've  proven  as  in- 
dividuals, we've  proven  as  a  club,  we've  proven 
as  a  town,  that  farming  can  be  made  to  pay. 
To  prove  that  is  to  have  received  our  pay." 

I  didn't  want  any  soreness  left  as  a  result 
of  disappointed  hopes  and  so  when  I  heard  my 


A  GREAT  DAY  153 

words  received  with  shouts  and  handclapping 
and  smiling  faces  I  was  very  glad.  I  reached 
for  the  first  sealed  envelop  and  tore  it  open. 
The  noise  subsided  until  you  could  have  heard 
a  pin  drop. 

"For  the  best  crop  of  hay  on  one  acre  of 
fresh  broken  land  the  prize  is  one  hundred 
dollars  in  cash.  It  gives  me  pleasure  to  an- 
nounce that  this  has  been  awarded  to  Horatio 
L.  Harrison." 

I  saw  Harrison's  face.  It  went  white,  then 
red.  A  good  many  other  faces  went  white, 
too,  and  for  a  second  there  was  an  ominous 
silence.  Then  Holt  sprang  to  the  front  of  the 
platform. 

"Fellow  citizens,"  he  shouted,  "let's  give 
three  cheers  for  Harrison.  Now — hurrah!" 

Perhaps  fifty  voices  joined  him.  At  the 
second  hurrah  a  hundred  came  in,  while  at 
the  third  the  whole  crowd  let  themselves  loose 
in  a  fashion  that  was  good  to  hear. 

"Tiger,"  shouted  Holt. 

And  it  came  full  throated  from  nine  hun- 
dred people.  Then  someone  called  for  Har- 
rison— he  was  a  young  man  of  thirty — and 
before  he  could  escape  he  had  been  pushed  to 
the  platform.  Holt  seized  an  arm  and  drew 


154  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

him  up  while  a  dozen  others  boosted  him.  He 
faced  the  crowd  an  instant  and  bowed.  I 
handed  him  his  money  in  greenbacks  and  he 
ducked  out  of  sight. 

I  took  up  the  second  envelop  and  opened  it. 

"For  the  best  crop  of  hay  on  ah  acre  of  land 
already  used  as  hay  land  the  prize  is  seventy- 
five  dollars.  This  has  been  awarded  to  Seth 
Edgar  Love  joy." 

Lovejoy  was  a  man  of  sixty  and  one  of  those 
who  had  followed  the  instructions  of  the  ag- 
ricultural expert  in  the  matter  of  proper  fer- 
tilization with  constant  grumbling.  I  think 
his  idea  had  been  to  prove  what  a  tarnation 
fool  the  expert  was.  In  spite  of  this  however 
he  had  succeeded  in  raising  a  ton  and  three- 
quarters  of  hay  on  an  acre  that  last  year  had 
yielded  him  less  than  one  ton.  I  was  more 
than  glad  therefore  for  this  award  as  it  left 
him  nothing  more  to  say.  At  my  announce- 
ment the  younger  men  cheered  lustily  and  de- 
manded a  speech  from  him — calling  him  by 
his  nick-name  Killjoy. 

"Tell  us  how  ye  done  it  in  spite  of  yerself," 
yelled  one  man. 

Lovejoy,  much  against  his  will,  was  forced 
to  the  platform,  Holt  dragging  him  up  as  he 


A  GREAT  DAY  155 

had  Harrison.  He  faced  the  crowd  a  second 
in  a  daze. 

"I  dunno,"  he  muttered,  "it's  th'  only  piece 
of  luck  I  ever  hed." 

"Not  luck,"  broke  in  Holt.  "Science  and 
hard  work  did  it.  Three  cheers  for  Lovejoy 
who  wasn't  too  old  to  learn." 

They  were  given  good  naturedly  and  I 
opened  the  third  envelop. 

"Prize  of  one  hundred  dollars  for  the  best 
crop  of  corn  on  an  acre  of  land.  This  has 
been  awarded  to  George  A.  Wentworth." 

Everyone  expected  this.  Wentworth  was  a 
lad  of  eighteen  who  had  devoted  his  whole  time 
to  this  one  acre  of  corn  and  had  watched  over 
every  stalk  of  it  like  a  widow  with  one  child. 
Where  ordinarily  twenty  bushels  to  the  acre 
was  considered  a  fair  crop  about  here,  he  had 
reaped  thirty-seven — an  increase  of  almost 
one  hundred  per  cent.  I  had  watched  the  boy 
all  summer  long.  He  was  the  type  of  young 
man  we  needed  here  abouts.  He  was  earnest, 
industrious  and  with  ambition  to  make  a  good 
living.  His  father  had  a  farm  of  some  sev- 
enty acres  which  wasn't  more  than  forty  per 
cent,  efficient  and  I  hoped  to  see  the  boy  come 
into  possession  of  it.  He  had  confided  in 


156  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

me  that  if  he  won  a  prize  he  was  going  to  buy 
a  couple  of  acres  of  his  father.  The  selection 
was  popular  and  he  was  given  a  great  ova- 
tion. He  was  the  only  man  so  far  who  was 
able  to  reach  the  platform  unaided  but  per- 
haps he  had  learned  from  the  previous  exam- 
ples the  uselessness  of  protest.  Those  who 
hadn't  won  were  anxious  to  get  as  much  sport 
as  possible  out  of  those  who  had.  Holt  seized 
his  arm  and  addressed  the  crowd. 

"Here's  the  type  of  boy  who's  going  to  be 
one  of  the  big  men  of  this  town  some  day,"  he 
said.  "And  it's  going  to  mean  something  to 
be  a  big  man  in  this  town,  for  this  is  going 
to  be  a  big  town.  Three  cheers  for  the  boy 
who  knows  enough  to  stay  East.  Now — let 
'em  out!" 

Holt  was  proving  that  a  college  education 
was  good  for  one  thing  at  least ;  it  taught  him 
how  to  get  noise  out  of  a  crowd.  Leaning 
over  the  rail  with  his  two  fists  clenched  and 
his  arms  swinging  he  looked  as  though  he  were 
forcing  every  man  to  shout  in  spite  of  him- 
self. I  know  I  joined  in  this  time  and  the 
sedate  committee  back  of  me  clapped  their 
hands  noisily.  As  for  Dick  and  Ruth  they 
stood  up  on  their  seats  and  shouted,  looking 


A  GREAT  DAY  157 

straight  into  Holt's  eyes  as  though  hypno- 
tized. I  handed  Wentworth  his  crisp  new 
hills  and  saw  that  there  were  tears  in  his  eyes. 
It  certainly  does  stir  a  man  to  hear  eight  or 
nine  hundred  people  shouting  his  name  as 
these  people  did. 

The  fourth  envelop  contained  the  name  of 
the  winner  of  the  best  house  garden.  Seventy- 
five  dollars  was  the  prize.  I  had  largely  to 
do  with  this  selection.  I  waited  until  there 
was  a  dead  silence  and  then  announced:  "It 
gives  me  great  pleasure  to  report  that  this 
prize  has  been  awarded  to  Mrs.  Lydia  A.  Cum- 
berland." 

I  think  this  came  as  a  surprise,  for  nearly 
every  man  in  the  village  had  considered  himself 
a  possible  winner  in  this  event.  My  own  gar- 
den approached  the  nearest  of  anyone's  to  hers 
and  in  the  matter  of  the  amount  raised  really 
excelled  Mrs.  Cumberland's.  However  I  was 
of  course  automatically  barred  from  the  com- 
petition, owing  to  my  position  as  judge.  Mrs. 
Cumberland  had  planted  about  a  half  acre  in 
the  rear  of  her  house.  This  soil  was  naturally 
rich  and  she  had  bestowed  infinite  pains  upon 
her  plants.  She  was  a  widow  with  two  chil- 
dren and  had  supplied  her  own  table  out  of 


158  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

the  produce,  put  up  in  glass  jars  almost  enough 
vegetables  to  last  her  through  the  winter  and 
made  a  few  dollars'  profit  in  cash  besides.  I 
particularly  wished  to  encourage  this  practice 
of  putting  up  our  own  vegetables  for  winter  use 
and  I  had  brought  here  with  me  a  sample  jar  of 
each  vegetable.  When  the  cheering  subsided 
I  held  up  a  jar  of  peas. 

"Look  at  them,"  I  said. 

Then  I  did  the  same  with  a  jar  of  string 
beans,  a  jar  of  turnips,  of  squash,  of  pickled 
small  beets.  Each  exhibition  was  greeted  with 
cheering. 

In  the  meanwhile  Holt  had  found  Mrs.  Cum- 
berland, and  with  her  arm  through  his  was 
escorting  her  up  the  steps  to  the  platform. 
She  was  a  dear,  lovable  lady  of  fifty  with  shy, 
gentle  manners  that  won  everyone's  heart. 
As  she  approached,  every  man  including  the 
band  rose  to  his  feet  and  faced  her  standing. 

"Oh,  dear !     Oh,  dear !"  she  choked. 

Holt  led  her  to  a  position  in  front  of  the 
crowd. 

"The  mother  of  our  future  pioneers — a  pio- 
neer herself,"  he  said  with  fine  feeling. 

Then  without  any  prompting  on  his  part  the 
crowd  let  itself  loose.  She  took  out  a  little 


A  GREAT  DAY  159 

white  handkerchief  and  waved  it  a  second. 
Then  she  pressed  it  to  her  eyes  and  shied  back, 
and  Holt  stepping  in  front  of  her  shielded  her 
from  further  view  of  the  audience. 

It  was  fine — fine.  I  don't  know  what  there 
is  about  such  little  incidents  to  so  touch  the 
heart  of  a  gathering  of  men  and  women  but 
I  do  know  they  are  mighty  good  for  men  and 
women.  There  wasn't  a  person  there  who 
wasn't  left  mellowed  and  almost  hallowed  by 
those  few  tense  seconds.  In  and  of  itself  and 
apart  from  all  else  we  had  done,  this  was  worth 
all  our.  labor.  It  sweetened  the  whole  of  us 
and  left  us  with  a  finer  human  feeling. 

The  prize  for  the  best  market  garden  went  to 
Higginbotham  and  the  prize  for  the  best  flower 
garden  went  to  Mildred  Cunningham,  the  min- 
ister's daughter.  You  ought  to  have  seen  the 
pride  with  which  Cunningham  escorted  the 
girl  to  the  platform.  The  man  since  the  in- 
ception of  the  movement  had  really  done  what 
he  could  to  help  us  both  in  his  sermons  and  his 
rounds  of  the  parish.  But  to  my  mind  the 
little  girl  had  done  more  than  he.  I'd  give 
more  any  time  for  a  person  who  actually  gets 
into  a  forward  movement  than  one  who  merely 
talks  about  it.  She  had  kept  half  the  sick  peo- 


160  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

pie  of  the  village  supplied  with  posies  all  sum- 
mer long. 

The  seventh  envelop  contained  the  winner 
of  the  prize  for  the  best  potato  crop — one  hun- 
dred dollars.  I  hadn't  any  idea  whom  the  Ag- 
ricultural School  experts  had  decided  upon.  I 
tore  open  the  envelop  and  read  automatically  as 
follows : 

"For  the  best  crop  of  potatoes  raised  upon 
an  acre  of  land — one  hundred  dollars.  It 
gives  me  great  pleasure  to  announce  as  the 
winner — " 

Then  I  stopped.  I  couldn't  believe  my  own 
eyes.  The  name  which  followed  was  my  own. 

"Go  on,"  someone  yelled  impatiently. 

"I  think  there  must  be  some  mistake,"  I  said, 
turning  to  the  judge.  "I  didn't  consider  my- 
self a  competitor." 

"Name!     Name!"  came  a  chorus. 

"Name!"  insisted  Holt. 

I  turned  to  the  crowd. 

"The  name  is  William  Carleton,"  I  said, 
"But  I  don't  feel—" 

I  didn't  get  any  farther.  The  crowd  began 
to  cheer  and  Holt  stepped  forward  to  egg  them 
on.  When  the  clamor  died  down  a  little,  Holt 
seized  my  arm.  "Ladies  and  gentlemen,"  he 


A  GREAT  DAY  161 

announced,  "Mr.  William  Carleton — a  farmer 
from  the  city  but  now  a  citizen  of  the  farm. 
He's  the  greatest  pioneer  of  us  all.  I've  seen 
his  potato  field  and  watched  him  care  for  it 
until  I  almost  wished  I  was  a  potato.  He's 
done  everything  except  make  feather  beds  for 
'em  and  tuck  'em  in  at  night.  Three  cheers 
more  for  Pioneer  Carleton." 

As  soon  as  I  could  get  my  voice  I  responded. 

"I'm  glad  of  the  honor,"  I  said,  "I  don't 
remember  anything  which  has  ever  made  me 
feel  prouder.  I  shall  always  remember  this. 
But,  the  hundred  dollars  I  want  to  turn  back 
right  here  to  the  Pioneer  Club." 

It  was  a  minute  or  two  after  I  had  torn  open 
the  eighth  envelop  before  I  could  make  myself 
heard.  This  was  a  prize  of  one  hundred  dol- 
lars for  the  largest  return  from  chickens  ac- 
cording to  capital  invested.  This  went  to  Guy 
Holborne,  who  had  invested  eighteen  dollars 
for  six  Plymouth  Rocks  with  a  rooster,  five 
dollars  in  eggs  to  set  and  three  dollars  in  mis- 
cellaneous expenses.  He  had  sold  five  dollars' 
worth  of  eggs  up  to  date  and  had  sixty  fine 
pullets  worth  seventy-five  cents  a  piece  ready 
for  the  market.  He  had  fed  his  chickens 
largely  on  waste  collected  from  his  neighbors. 


162  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

The  prize  for  the  largest  return  from  cows 
according  to  capital  invested  went  to  Ebenezer 
Blunt,  the  prize  for  the  largest  return  from 
pigs  to  Arthur  Libby  and  the  prize  for  the 
most  notable  improvement  in  an  old  orchard 
was  divided  between  Henderson  and  Talbot, 
two  of  our  largest  land  owners.  They  fol- 
lowed my  example  and  turned  the  money  back 
to  the  Pioneer  Club. 

As  the  last  announcement  was  made  Holt 
roused  the  band  and  they  played  "America," 
everyone  standing. 

The  athletic  events  under  Dick's  direction 
followed  and  kept  the  crowd  amused  until  din- 
ner time.  During  the  afternoon  the  fakirs  did 
a  brisk  business  while  the  town  hall  was  packed 
until  dark.  A  goodly  number  of  automobiles 
loaded  with  city  folks  anxious  to  see  an  old- 
fashioned  country  fair  came  and  went,  adding 
to  the  general  holiday  atmosphere. 

It  was  late  that  night  before  I  really  had  a 
chance  to  talk  over  things  with  Ruth. 

"Well,"  I  said  when  we  w<ere  alone,  "how 
did  it  go?" 

"Don't  see  how  it  could  have  gone  any  bet- 
ter," she  answered. 


A  GREAT  DAY  163 

"That  was  a  great  move  of  Holt's  in  leading 
the  cheering,"  I  said. 

"Fine!     Fine!" 

"Think  the  decisions  left  any  hard  feel- 
ings?" 

"Only  the  usual  per  cent.,  Billy,"  she  an- 
swered, "and  they  won't  last.  I  heard  most 
of  them  talking  about  what  they  were  going  to 
'do  next  year." 

"That's  the  stuff,"  I  said. 

"You  see  they  had  worked  out  the  results 
pretty  well  for  themselves  before  the  announce- 
ment. No;  it  has  been  a  success — a  success 
from  beginning  to  end." 

"And  the  women?" 

"There  isn't  one  who  isn't  going  to  bed  to- 
night tired  and  happy." 

"It  isn't  unusual  for  them  to  go  to  bed  tired," 
I  said. 

She  nodded. 

"But  you  can  be  tired  in  twenty  different 
ways,"  she  said.  "And  this  is  the  kind  of  tired 
that's  good  for  them." 


CHAPTER  XII 

NEW    VENTURES 

It's  natural  to  be  over  optimistic  in  the  first 
flush  of  success  in  a  new  venture,  but  in  this 
case  there  was  no  reaction.  Outside  of  the 
financial  success  the  experiment  had  been  for 
every  member  of  the  club,  which  meant  prac- 
tically every  member  of  the  village,  our  most 
notable  achievement  had  been  in  rousing  the 
community  spirit.  We  had  all  got  together  in 
a  fashion  that  distinguished  us  from  our 
neighboring  towns.  People  from  outside  be- 
gan to  speak  of  us  residents  of  Brewster  as 
Brewsterites,  which  to  my  mind  was  signifi- 
cant. If  our  prize  system  hadn't  accomplished 
any  more  than  this  it  had  been  worth  while. 
This  was  just  the  spirit  we  wanted  as  a  basis 
for  working  out  more  in  detail  our  pioneer 
idea.  Ruth  and  I  hadn't  forgotten  our  lesson 
from  the  pioneers  of  Little  Italy,  that  half  the 
secret  of  earning  more  money  is  to  save  more 
money,  and  that  to  do  this  means  a  simpler 

164 


NEW  VENTURES  165 

standard  of  living.  This  was  one  of  the 
things  that  I  had  talked  over  with  Holt  and 
Barclay  and  the  committee  with  the  result  of 
a  hearty  endorsement  from  Holt,  a  mild  en- 
dorsement from  Barclay,  and  an  agreement 
from  the  committee  not  to  oppose.  They  all 
admitted  anyway  that  something  must  be  done 
to  keep  interest  alive  during  the  long  winter 
months. 

Now  I  had  no  definite  plan  in  mind  beyond 
a  vague  notion  to  rouse  if  possible  an  interest 
in  the  romantic  lives  of  our  ancestors — to 
bring  home  to  those  of  to-day  the  possibility  of 
making  our  own  lives  just  as  romantic  and  in- 
dependent and  venturesome.  Whatever  we 
accomplished  grew  out  of  talks  between  Holt, 
Ruth  and  myself,  but  to  a  still  larger  degree 
out  of  incidents  that  grew  out  of  the  under- 
taking itself.  Our  whole  enterprise  developed 
from  within  itself.  We  planned  nothing  ex- 
cept along  general  lines  and  forced  nothing. 

For  example,  here  is  one  thing  that  turned 
up  unexpectedly.  Holt  came  to  me  one  day 
and  said  he  had  run  across  a  moving  picture 
man  who  was  in  town  with  a  view  to  installing 
a  moving  picture  show.  The  latter  had  been 
to  Moulton,  who  owned  the  opera  house  be- 


1 66  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

neath  which  his  store  was  located,  and  had  tried 
to  make  a  bargain  with  him  to  rent  the  hall. 

"Why  in  thunder  don't  we  do  it  ourselves?" 
was  Holt's  question  to  me. 

"As  a  personal  business  venture?"  I  asked. 

"As  a  business  venture  for  the  club,"  he  an- 
swered. "There's  no  doubt  but  what  a  moving 
picture  show  is  going  to  be  started  here  sooner 
or  later.  You  can't  prevent  it.  If  an  out- 
sider conducts  the  business  he  carries  off  the 
good  money  of  our  members,  he  forces  us  to 
buck  against  a  rival  interest  and  he  runs  any 
old  films  he  chooses.  If  we  run  it  ourselves 
we  can  make  it  part  of  our  winter's  amuse- 
ment, select  our  films,  and  turn  back  into  the 
club  treasury  everything  over  running  ex- 
penses." 

"And  if  we  lose?" 

"We  can't  lose.  Wouldn't  do  any  harm  to 
try  it  anyway,  and  if  we  do  lose  it's  a  safe  bet 
it  would  scare  off  any  outsider  from  ever  try- 
ing it." 

Holt's  argument  seemed  sound,  The  capi- 
tal required  was  not  much;  enough  to  pay  the 
rent  of  the  hall  which  we  had  to  hire  once  in 
two  weeks  anyway  and  the  price  of  installing 
the  plant  which  was  only  a  matter  of  a  few 


NEW  VENTURES  167 

hundred  dollars.  But  the  most  attractive  fea- 
ture was  the  opportunity  this  would  give  us  to 
select  films  that  would  serve  our  ends — picture 
plays  of  the  landing  of  the  Pilgrims,  Indian 
fights  and  what  not  to  say  nothing  of  purely 
educational  features  on  plant  growing,  proper 
sanitation  and  so  on.  Then  the  negative  side 
was  also  worth  something — the  chance  to  cut 
out  the  plays  that  might  have  an  unwholesome 
tendency.  The  more  I  thought  of  this  the  bet- 
ter the  idea  seemed,  so  that  I  offered  to  advance 
the  necessary  capital  without  interest  to  be  paid 
back  out  of  the  profits — if  any  there  were. 

We  put  the  matter  before  the  club  at  the 
next  semi-monthly  meeting  and  the  idea  re- 
ceived enthusiastic  endorsement,  as  it  natu- 
rally might  be  expected  to  do  when  it  prom- 
ised amusement,  a  possible  profit  and  no  risk. 
Whereupon  we  closed  with  Moulton  and  opened 
negotiations  with  a  leading  film  house  for  the 
lease  of  a  machine.  Holt  undertook  the  busi- 
ness management  of  the  enterprise  and  noth- 
ing could  have  suited  him  better.  He  was  a 
born  publicity  man. 

"I'm  going  to  make  the  neighboring  towns 
pay  most  of  the  running  expenses,"  he  de- 
clared. 


i68  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"How?"  I  inquired. 

"You  wait  and  see." 

I  waited  and  did  see.  He  ran  two  shows  a 
week — one  on  Wednesday  which  he  called  Pio- 
neer Club  night,  and  one  on  Saturday  evening. 
The  films  for  both  were  identical  but  for  the 
Wednesday  night  show  he  charged  members 
of  the  Pioneer  Club  only  five  cents'  admission 
with  the  result  that  they  filled  every  available 
seat  in  the  hall.  The  Saturday  night  show 
cost  ten  cents  and  being  a  repetition  of  the 
first  naturally  didn't  attract  but  a  few  of  the 
members.  But  he  plastered  the  neighboring 
towns  within  a  radius  of  ten  miles  with  green 
handbills  that  again  filled  his  hall.  He  let  him- 
self loose  on  these  and  had  as  much  fun  as  a 
schoolboy  out  of  his  attempts  to  whet  curi- 
osity. 

We  held  our  semi-monthly  meetings  on  two 
of  the  four  Wednesday  nights  and  on  this  oc- 
casion had  one  or  more  of  the  films  as  a  free 
entertainment  following  the  business  meeting. 
It  was  in  connection  with  this  that  we  also  in- 
augurated our  pioneer  talks. 

At  the  beginning  Holt  and  I  were  the  speak- 
ers, although  later  as  our  treasury  grew  fat 
with  the  proceeds  of  our  picture  show  we  used 


NEW  VENTURES  169 

some  of  the  money  to  bring  in  lyceum  lecturers 
and  at  least  once  a  month  some  specialist  from 
the  Agricultural  School.  Our  subjects  were 
limited  either  to  American  pioneer  history  of 
the  East  or  to  practical  talks  on  farming.  One 
thing  we  insisted  upon  was  that  they  must  be 
put  into  popular  and  entertaining  form.  For 
instance,  I  in  my  first  talk  had  as  my  subject 
"Early  Tillers  of  New  England  Soil."  I  spent 
a  good  deal  of  time  at  the  city  public  library 
in  looking  up  my  material,  picking  out  inter- 
esting facts  about  the  nature  of  the  soil  at  that 
time,  the  implements  in  use,  the  difficulties  that 
had  to  be  overcome  and  the  results  obtained. 
I  put  a  good  deal  of  emphasis  on  the  difficulties 
as  compared  with  those  of  to-day  and  yet 
pointed  out  how  cheerfully  the  early  settlers 
went  at  their  task  because  they  worked  at  it 
in  freedom.  In  connection  with  this  we  ran 
a  film  that  was  supposed  to  describe  the  de- 
parture of  the  Pilgrims  from  England  and 
their  landing  in  this  country.  It  was  wonder- 
fully vivid  and  made  it  seem  almost  like  an 
event  of  yesterday. 

Holt  treated  in  much  the  same  fashion 
"The  Fighting  Spirit  of  Our  Ancestors."  I 
tell  you  he  made  a  warrior  of  every  man  in  the 


I/O 


NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 


audience  before  he  was  through  and  a  war- 
rior's mother  of  every  woman.  We  ran  with 
this  a  realistic  Indian  fight  film. 

At  another  talk  Ruth  spoke  on  the  "Women 
of  Early  New  England,"  describing  their 
lives  and  their  work  and  what  the  women  of 
to-day  owed  to  them.  "The  Courtship  of 
Miles  Standish,"  was  the  film  we  used  with 
this  and  it  was  so  popular  that  it  led  later  on  to 
the  acting  of  a  series  of  tableaux  founded  on 
Longfellow's  poem.  This  was  the  big  social 
event  of  the  winter,  coming  at  Christmas  time 
and  ending  with  a  dance. 

The  Lyceum  speakers  took  up  various  phases 
of  New  England  life  in  a  more  scholarly  fash- 
ion, and  all  were  well  received.  But  the  seri- 
ous work  of  the  winter  came  with  the  lecturers 
from  the  Agricultural  School  who  considered 
the  subject  of  live  stock  in  New  England — an 
interesting  question  if  not  a  particularly  ro- 
mantic one.  They  discussed  the  matter  of 
why  we  should  raise  our  own  meats  instead 
of  importing  them  from  the  West.  And  really, 
for  a  community  like  ours,  there  didn't  seem 
to  be  anything  at  all  to  be  said  against  the 
proposition.  If  there  were  obvious  objections 
to  keeping  chickens,  pigs,  and  cows  in  a  tene- 


NEW  VENTURES  171 

ment,  they  certainly  didn't  hold  here.  And 
yet  there  hadn't  been  a  steer  raised  for  meat 
in  our  town  for  twenty-five  years.  We  didn't 
even  raise  the  corn  to  feed  our  cows  on.  Even 
pigs  were  scarce,  while  eggs  and  chickens  were 
actually  bought  to  a  large  extent  from  the  city 
market.  On  the  face  of  it  nothing  could  seem 
more  absurd.  With  land  enough  and  labor 
enough  to  supply  ourselves  we  allowed  our- 
selves to  be  supplied  from  land  several  thou- 
sand miles  away.  And  it  wasn't  because  we 
got  our  goods  cheaper.  We  paid  prices  that 
almost  drove  us  into  bankruptcy.  We  might 
with  as  much  logic  have  imported  our  water. 
Now  the  only  explanation  of  this  that  any- 
one could  see  was  that  convenience,  which  is 
another  word  for  laziness,  had  led  us  into  the 
habit  and  this  habit  had  become  so  fixed  that 
it  now  seemed  like  a  necessity.  Of  course  it 
wasn't  argued  that  we  could  raise  meat  on  any 
such  wholesale  scale  as  is  done  in  the  West 
where  the  plains  furnish  free  fodder,  or  in  the 
corn  belt  where  corn  could  be  raised  at  a  price 
for  stock  feeding  impossible  to  us.  But  rais- 
ing enough  to  supply  at  least  the  home  mar- 
ket didn't  involve  those  conditions.  There 
wasn't  a  man  with  a  farm  who  couldn't  feed 


i;2  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

a  portion  of  his  hay  and  corn  to  beef  to 
better  advantage  than  he  could  sell  it,  who 
didn't  have  grazing  land  available  for  that  pur- 
pose that  at  present  was  only  growing  up  to 
useless  small  growth.  Even  when  balanced 
against  the  question  of  whether  the  feed 
couldn't  at  a  better  profit  be  turned  into  milk, 
a  field  was  still  left  open  for  beef  enough  to 
supply  the  local  market. 

Another  lecturer  took  up  the  matter  of  sheep 
raising.  It  wasn't  so  very  long  ago  that  every 
farmer  in  New  England  had  a  small  flock  of 
sheep  as  much  as  a  matter  of  course  as  he  had 
a  horse.  To-day  with  the  price  of  mutton 
and  lamb  soaring,  with  wool  at  a  premium,  a 
flock  of  sheep  on  a  New  England  farm  is  a  cu- 
riosity. 

Now  if  there  were  dearth  of  land,  if  the  ad- 
vancing population  from  the  cities  had  sent 
up  real  estate  values  this  would  be  a  perfectly 
natural  result.  But  the  exact  opposite  is 
the  case.  The  deserted  farms  sprinkled  all 
through  New  England,  farms  left  to  grow  up 
to  waste  timber,  farms  on  the  market  for  a 
song,  would  seem  to  prove  that  much.  Idle 
pasture  land  around  such  farms  as  are  worked 
further  disproves  that  it  isn't  lack  of  land  that 


NEW  VENTURES  173 

has  brought  this  about.  Then  what  in  Heav- 
en's name  is  the  cause  of  this  wasted  oppor- 
tunity? 

I  can  answer  only  so  far  as  I  studied  the  men 
about  me.  The  opening  of  the  big  western 
grazing  fields  did  at  first  have  its  effect  in  send- 
ing down  eastern  values  of  live  stock.  Thou- 
sands of  sheep  fed  by  nature  permitted  a  price 
even  with  a  terrible  waste,  even  with  ex- 
pensive marketing,  that  discouraged  eastern 
farmers.  But  that  was  twenty-five  years  and 
more  ago.  To-day  prices  are  different  and 
should  again  encourage  eastern  stock  raising 
at  least  for  local  markets.  But  in  the  mean- 
while our  eastern  farmers  have  fallen  out  of 
the  habit.  It  has  become  a  proverb  that  sheep 
don't  pay — just  as,  for  that  matter,  it  has  be- 
come a  proverb  that  chickens  don't  pay,  cattle 
don't  pay,  pigs  don't  pay,  hay  don't  pay  or,  in 
brief  and  as  Hadley  was  constantly  remind- 
ing me,  "Nothin'  don't  pay."  He  spoke  with 
more  truth  than  he  thought  when  he  said  that. 
It's  a  fact  that  "nothin'  don't  pay,"  but  every- 
thing else  does  pay. 

Now  as  the  Agricultural  School  expert  in- 
sisted, a  flock  of  one  hundred  sheep  carefully 
looked  after  in  the  East  can  be  made  worth  as 


174  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

much  as  five  hundred  or  a  thousand  half  neg- 
lected on  the  western  plains.  The  only  condi- 
tion modern  methods  impose  on  modern  farm- 
ers is  that  such  things  as  are  raised  shall  be 
cared  for.  There  must  be  no  waste.  That  is 
doing  nothing  more  than  carry  to  the  farm 
the  principles  which  govern  all  modern  busi- 
nesses. The  day  of  allowing  sheep,  cattle, 
chickens,  or  produce  to  care  for  themselves 
and  taking  what  is  left,  has  passed.  The  only 
unfortunate  feature  of  this  new  system  is  that 
it  involves  on  the  part  of  the  farmer  hard  work. 
In  getting  out  of  the  habit  of  raising  such 
things  as  are  raised  to-day  in  a  big  way  in  the 
West,  the  New  England  farmer  has  gotten  out 
of  the  habit  of  hard  work.  That's  the  gos- 
pel truth  in  a  nut-shell  as  it  was  shown  up  in 
our  town.  With  the  pioneer  movement  shifted 
to  the  West,  all  the  pioneer  qualities  went  with 
it.  Deserted  farms  don't  necessarily  mean 
bad  farm  lands;  they  mean  bad  farmers,  lazy 
farmers,  uninspired  farmers.  Once  again  I 
find  myself  getting  back  to  this  as  a  funda- 
mental truth  and  once  again  I  bring  up  as 
proof  the  fact  that  the  minute  you  place  upon 
these  acres  an  old-world  pioneer  like  Dardoni 
you  see  the  land  spring  to  life  as  by  magic. 


NEW  VENTURES  175 

Pigs  and  chickens,  how  to  select  the  stock, 
how  to  feed  them  and  house  them  were  treated 
in  the  same  manner  by  other  speakers  from 
the  school.  I  was  surprised  in  how  scientific 
a  manner  this  business  has  been  worked  out. 
Take  for  example  the  matter  of  the  by-product, 
manure.  One  speaker  made  the  statement — 
it  sounded  rash  enough  but  he  assured  us  that 
it  was  based  on  statistics — that  the  annual  loss 
in  America  through  the  incompetent  handling 
of  barnyard  dressing,  amounted  to  six  hundred 
million  dollars.  This  represents  just  so  much 
wasted  nitrogen,  phosphoric  acid  and  potash. 
One  speaker  presented  a  table  showing  the 
value  in  dollars  and  cents  of  dressing  per  one 
thousand  pounds,  live  weight.  Sheep  produce 
thirty-four  and  one-tenth  pounds  per  day,  val- 
ued at  twenty-six  dollars  a  year;  calves  sixty- 
seven  and  eight-tenths,  valued  at  twenty-four 
dollars  a  year;  pigs  eighty-three  and  six- 
tenths,  valued  at  sixty  dollars  a  year;  cows 
seventy-four  and  one-tenth  pounds,  valued  at 
twenty-nine  dollars  and  twenty-seven  cents  a 
year;  horses  forty-eight  and  eight-tenths 
pounds,  valued  at  twenty-seven  dollars  and 
seventy-four  cents  a  year.  And  this  is  merely 
a  by-product. 


176  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

I  tell  you  those  figures  did  us  good.  Those 
of  us  who  were  in  the  habit  of  holding  our 
breath  in  awe  at  mention  of  the  capitaliza- 
tion of  the  steel  trust,  held  up  our  heads  and 
felt  more  like  men  when  we  realized  that  we 
were  in  a  sense  stockholders  in  a  business 
that  put  that  trust  completely  in  the  shade. 
For  example,  the  annual  production  of  eggs 
in  the  United  States  is  about  1,293,800,000 
dozens.  At  the  average  price  of  eggs  the 
total  value  of  these  is  $452,830,000 — nearly 
five  hundred  million  dollars  a  year.  Added 
to  this,  more  than  two  hundred  million  dol- 
lars' worth  of  poultry  is  consumed.  And 
this  is  only  one  item.  Consider  that  in  the 
State  of  Wisconsin  alone  the  value  of  the  but- 
ter and  cheese  products  for  a  single  year  runs 
over  eighty  million  dollars;  consider  that  the 
wheat  crop  is  worth  annually  considerably 
over  a  billion;  that  vegetables  alone  represent 
another  annual  value  of  over  two  hundred  and 
fifty  million  and  you  get  some  idea  of  what  a 
business  the  same  farmer  who  is  laughed  at 
in  the  comic  weeklies  is  doing.  The  crop  for 
the  year  nineteen  hundred  amounted  to  more 
than  three  billion  dollars.  And  that  represents 
without  a  doubt  another  three  billion  of  waste, 


NEW  VENTURES  177 

for  there  isn't  a  nation  on  the  face  of  the  earth 
that  so  uneconomically  plants  and  reaps  and 
markets  its  harvest.  Why  shouldn't  we  farm- 
ers carry  ourselves  proudly  ?  Why  instead  of 
being  the  butt  and  plaything  of  financiers 
shouldn't  we  hold  those  same  men  at  our 
mercy?  These  were  questions  that  before  the 
winter  was  out  more  than  one  man  asked  of 
himself. 

One  other  point  came  up  for  discussion  in 
the  course  of  the  winter  and  that  was  the  ques- 
tion of  specialization ;  of  whether  as  a  commu- 
nity it  would  pay  us  better  to  center  our  efforts 
upon  some  one  line  such  as  dairy  products, 
meat  products,  vegetable  products  or  what  not, 
or  whether  it  wasn't  better  as  small  farmers 
with  no  particular  advantages  of  soil  or  market 
for  us  to  carry  on  diversified  farms.  On  the 
whole  the  latter  was  the  opinion  of  the  school 
experts  and  also  carried  the  strongest  appeal 
to  the  majority  of  us.  If  every  man  kept  at 
least  one  cow,  a  hog  or  so,  a  few  sheep  and  a 
few  hens,  he  first  of  all  was  then  in  a  position 
to  supply  himself — and  after  all  a  man  is  his 
own  best  market — and  secondly  it  gave  him  a 
more  regular  income  as  his  stock  didn't  de- 
velop for  the  market  all  at  one  time;  and 


178  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

thirdly,  he  didn't  put  all  his  eggs  in  one  basket. 
A  man  specializing  for  instance  in  poultry  is 
apt  by  disease  to  lose  his  whole  flock  and  the 
same  is  true  of  his  herd  or  his  hogs.  A  di- 
versified farm  makes  a  man  independent  of 
market  conditions.  If  poultry  is  low  and  eggs 
high  he  can  keep  his  pullets  for  eggs.  If  beef 
is  low  and  butter  high,  he  can  keep  his  cows 
for  milk  and  vice  versa.  In  other  words,  he 
isn't  forced  to  sell  at  certain  times  regardless  of 
what  the  market  is. 

One  thing  however  was  insisted  upon,  that 
so  far  as  possible  a  man  should  keep  the  best 
of  each  kind.  This  led  to  the  subject  of  breed- 
ing, and  this  led  in  turn  to  the  question  of 
whether  to  this  end  it  wasn't  possible  for  us 
as  a  group  to  invest  in  a  common  breeder — 
a  blooded  bull,  a  blooded  ram,  which  as  indi- 
viduals none  of  us  could  afford.  And  this 
again  led,  as  about  everything  we  touched  upon 
that  winter  had  led,  to  the  question  of  closer 
cooperation.  Two  hundred  years  ago  the  In- 
dians and  various  other  forces  which  to-day 
seem  to  us  only  romantic  led  our  ancestors  to 
cooperate  in  a  certain  way;  to-day  economic 
conditions  are  bringing  about  the  same  result. 
In  February  the  one  thought  that  was  upper- 
most in  the  minds  of  us  all  was  cooperation. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

GETTING   TOGETHER 

For  two  winters  we  had  met  together  and 
amused  ourselves  together.  That  was  what 
counted — counted  even  more  than  the  work  we 
had  done  together.  Perhaps  you  wouldn't 
think  that  this  social  intercourse  and  the  es- 
tablishment of  this  common  pioneer  back- 
ground was  of  any  great  importance,  but  if 
you  had  been  one  of  us  you  would  surely  have 
felt  its  importance.  It  made  us  one  big  family 
as  nothing  else  in  the  world  could  have  done. 
Church  societies  build  up  as  many  barriers  as 
they  break  down ;  so,  too,  do  fraternal  and  po- 
litical societies.  But  here  we  went  back  to  a 
meeting  ground  which  kept  us  shoulder  to 
shoulder  with  one  another  and  with  our  com- 
mon past.  Men  and  women  can  be  entertained 
together  when  nothing  else  is  possible. 

Then  again,  I  don't  suppose  city  folks  know 
what  a  New  England  winter  means  to  a  New 
England  farmer.  Winter  doesn't  mean  much 

179 


i8o  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

in  the  city  except  a  complication  with  coal  bills. 
Routine  work  goes  on  in  the  same  routine  way 
and  the  amusement  of  the  beaches  is  shifted 
to  the  amusement  of  the  theaters.  But  in  the 
country  Nature  shuts  up  shop  and  there  is  a 
complete  change  of  work  and  way  of  living. 
It's  a  period  of  exile  for  many  and  a  period 
of  loafing.  Men  and  women  are  shut  up  with 
themselves,  or  at  best  with  their  own.  Six 
months  of  this  isn't  good  for  anyone.  Every 
old  spite  and  grudge  and  grouch  fattens  and 
grows  strong.  Men  get  surly  and  women  get 
cranky.  Men  eat  too  much  and  women  cook 
too  much.  If  a  man  hasn't  any  pet  grievance 
of  his  own  he  has  plenty  supplied  him  by  the 
press  and  magazines.  Farmers  read  too  much 
of  murders  and  sudden  death,  of  corruption  in 
business  and  politics  and  society.  They  have 
too  much  time  to  think  over  that  stuff  after 
they've  read  it  and  they  don't  exercise  enough 
to  work  it  off.  City  folk  stand  it  because  they 
read  and  forget  and  don't  take  it  seriously. 
But  I  tell  you  some  magazine  publishers  have 
something  to  answer  for  in  the  picture  of  city 
life  they  have  drawn  for  country  people 
whether  true  or  not.  As  I've  heard  Hadley 
say,  "  'Pears  to  me  like  everything's  rotten  to- 


GETTING  TOGETHER  181 

day."  It  makes  men  careless  about  being  rot- 
ten themselves  when  they  think  all  the  rest  of 
the  world  is. 

The  value  of  our  meetings  didn't  end  with 
the  meetings  themselves.  People  who  had 
been  born  and  brought  up  together  met  in  true 
neighborly  fashion  for  the  first  time  through 
the  Pioneer  Club.  This  was  because  we  fur- 
nished them  a  common  interest.  This  led  to 
more  everyday  intercourse  that  winter — to 
neighborhood  calls  and  neighborhood  parties. 
Ruth  helped  this  along  wonderfully.  She  en- 
tertained a  good  deal  herself  and  helped  others 
entertain,  but  I  tell  you  she  had  her  own  ideas 
how  this  should  be  done.  She  wouldn't  have 
any  fuss  and  feathers,  such  as  we  had  experi- 
enced in  the  suburbs.  People  didn't  have  to 
dress  up  in  their  best  bibs  and  tuckers  to  call 
on  her,  and  there  was  neither  bridge  nor  cakes 
nor  teas  nor  ices.  People  dropped  in  just  as 
they  were  and  brought  their  sewing  with  them. 
For  the  younger  people  she  devised  the  Miles 
Standish  play  with  such  materials  as  she  had 
at  hand.  Then  there  were  charades  and  old- 
fashioned  games  and  what  not — everything 
simple,  everything  inexpensive,  everybody 
friendly  and  at  ease.  She  kept  the  women, 


182  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

both  young  and  old,  astir  all  winter  long  and 
gave  them  something  else  to  think  about  be- 
sides the  next  day's  cooking,  washing  or  mend- 
ing. She  even  helped  them  simplify  these 
necessary  duties  and  taught  them  a  more 
wholesome  standard  of  living.  From  morning 
till  night  she  was  a  teacher,  but  no  one  except 
myself  realized  this.  She  set  everyone  an  ex- 
ample in  her  house  and  astonished  them  with 
the  ease  she  did  her  own  work  and  cared  for 
three  children  without  wearing  herself  out. 
They  never  found  her  too  busy  to  stop  for  a 
moment  and  never  discovered  her  with  either 
a  headache  or  a  lame  back.  Over  and  over 
I've  heard  her  say  to  them,  "Housekeeping  is 
only  a  play  game."  Then  she  would  laugh 
until  you  couldn't  help  believing  that  it  really 
was.  And  to  her  it  was.  God  bless  her — to 
her  it  was.  It  was  wonderful  how  far  the  in- 
fluence of  her  laughter  carried. 

And  all  this  while  we  had  been  strengthen- 
ing the  pioneer  idea,  too.  We  found  that  older 
people  responded  to  its  spirit  almost  as  eagerly 
as  boys  do  to  the  same  thing  in  a  simpler  form 
as  expressed  in  the  Boy  Scout  movement. 
There  isn't  a  boy  with  red  blood  in  his  veins, 
whether  raised  in  New  York,  London  or  a 


GETTING  TOGETHER  183 

country  village,  who  isn't  stirred  by  the  hardy 
principles  that  govern  your  true  scout.  It's 
amazing  to  see  how  much  of  that  spirit  is  in 
their  blood;  how  gladly  they  return  to  more 
primitive  conditions.  Boys  brought  up  in  lux- 
ury taste  their  first  real  meal  when  they  munch 
a  slice  of  bacon  sizzled  over  the  embers  of  a 
wood  fire  or  a  potato  cooked  in  the  ashes. 
They  learn  the  real  meaning  of  sleep  when  at 
the  end  of  a  hard  day's  hike  they  roll  up  in 
a  blanket  in  the  open.  Boys  are  born  pioneers 
the  world  over — even  to-day.  The  spirit  is 
educated  out  of  them  in  many  cases,  more's  the 
pity,  but  after  all  it  remains  at  the  basis  of 
every  real  man. 

So  when  at  our  meetings,  directly  and  indi- 
rectly, we  harped  upon  this  idea  and  argued 
that  the  fun  of  living  was  within  ourselves  and 
not  outside  ourselves;  when  we  insisted  that 
the  more  we  depended  upon  things  outside  our- 
selves for  happiness,  the  less  we  responded; 
when  we  argued  for  a  simpler  standard  in  our 
clothes,  our  food,  our  surroundings,  our  amuse- 
ments and  a  heartier  dependence  upon  our 
work,  we  saw  its  effect.  Much  has  been  said 
about  the  advantage  to  farmers  of  the  tele- 
phone, the  rural  mail  which  keeps  them  in  daily 


1 84  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

touch  with  the  outside  world  and  labor-saving 
devices  which  make  their  work  easier,  but  hon- 
estly I  believe  that  if  in  the  end  this  saves  them 
from  some  evils  it  brings  evils  of  its  own  which 
they  haven't  yet  learned  to  overcome.  If  these 
things  save  them  from  drudgery  and  monot- 
ony of  one  type  it  isn't  long  before  they  face 
drudgery  and  monotony  of  another  type,  when 
they  are  allowed  to  dwell  upon  that  feature 
of  their  work.  There  isn't  in  the  world  a  big- 
ger drudge  leading  a  more  monotonous  life 
than  your  city  clerk  who  keeps  agents  scouring 
the  world  to  furnish  him  amusement  for  his 
idle  hours  and  to  make  the  routine  of  his  work 
lighter.  And  he's  just  as  apt  to  go  crazy  as 
your  lonely  farmer  if  he  doesn't  learn  to  seek 
the  joy  of  living  within  himself  and  not  in  his 
surroundings. 

We  tried  particularly  to  get  at  the  young 
man  in  our  town  and  make  him  feel  it  isn't  the 
wilderness  and  virgin  land  and  homesteads 
that  makes  your  pioneer,  but  facing  bravely 
whatever  conditions  may  confront  him,  rely- 
ing upon  his  own  efforts  to  win  through  them. 
It  takes  as  much  of  a  pioneer  to  work  three 
acres  as  one  hundred  and  sixty;  a  man  is  as 
much  of  a  pioneer  who  forces  worn-out  land 


GETTING  TOGETHER  185 

to  yield,  as  one  who  clears  virgin  land  of  rocks 
and  stumps.  It  isn't  the  nature  of  the  work 
but  the  attitude  of  the  man  towards  his  work 
which  distinguishes  the  plodder  from  the 
pioneer. 

It  is  especially  easy  to  appreciate  this  fact 
when  dealing  directly  with  Nature.  Every 
farm  is  a  newly  claimed  homestead,  if  you 
choose  to  look  at  it  that  way.  And  even  if  it 
has  been  worked  a  hundred  years  there  isn't 
a  season  when  there  is  not  real  pioneer  work 
to  be  done.  As  for  the  raising  of  live  stock,  it 
is  done  to-day  much  as  it  was  two  hundred 
years  ago,  except  for  greater  attention  to  de- 
tails. 

It  may  seem  strange  to  some  that  just  a  fresh 
point  of  view  on  the  same  old  world  makes  so 
great  a  difference.  It  didn't  however  sur- 
prise me,  because  I  had  sensed  the  effect  of 
this  in  my  own  life.  If  in  the  days  when 
things  were  going  well  with  me  as  a  clerk  with 
the  United  Woolen  Company  anyone  had  told 
me  that  I'd  come  down  to  digging  in  the  sub- 
way as  a  day  laborer,  I'd  have  felt  disgraced. 
Such  work  seemed  like  sheer  animal-like 
drudgery.  So  it  is,  if  you  go  at  it  that  way. 
On  the  other  hand,  when  I  saw  it  as  the  pio- 


i86  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

neer  work  it  really  is,  I  went  at  it  with  better 
spirit  than  ever  I  did  adding  up  another  man's 
figures  for  him. 

Two  abstract  things  then  we  had  accom- 
plished besides  the  practical :  the  establishment 
of  both  the  social  spirit  and  the  pioneer  spirit 
among  ourselves.  We  were  together  like  one 
big  family  and  we  were  working  in  a  move- 
ment that  might  fairly  be  called  the  Man  Scout 
movement.  That's  just  exactly  what  it  was. 
It  was  alive  with  just  the  same  wholesome  out- 
of-doors  adventurous  spirit  that  characterizes 
the  boy  scout  movement.  I  guess  it's  a  pretty 
safe  bet  that  anything  which  appeals  uni- 
versally to  boys  will  appeal  universally  to  men. 
It  was  so  in  our  town  anyway. 

The  next  step  then — the  cooperative  step — 
came  about  naturally  and  almost  inevitably. 
No  one  planned  it  and  no  one  so  far  as  I  re- 
member suggested  it.  It  would  have  been  a 
dangerous  thing  to  suggest  directly.  As  a 
phrase  it  smacked  of  socialism  and  there  were 
mighty  few  socialists  in  our  town.  Our  in- 
heritance and  our  training  was  all  against  it. 
There  wasn't  a  man  so  poor  that  even  if  he 
was  willing  to  make  a  martyr  out  of  himself 
would  let  anyone  else  make  a  martyr  out  of 


GETTING  TOGETHER  187 

him.  The  worse  off  he  was,  the  more  inde- 
pendent he  became.  He  would  rather  play  a 
lone  hand  at  a  losing  game  than  win  by  join- 
ing his  troubles  with  those  of  someone  else. 
Your  bred-in-the-bone  New  Englander  is  a 
solitary  man  who,  when  pressed  to  the  wall, 
turns  and  fights  his  own  fight.  He'll  unite 
against  a  common  outside  enemy  but  not 
against  his  own.  It's  this  spirit  that  made  our 
nation,  but  it's  this  spirit  too  which  is  to-day 
destroying  the  man  himself.  With  a  closer 
knit  civilization  demanding  cooperation  he  is 
as  a  rule  so  jealous  of  his  personal  rights  that 
he  balks.  And  after  all,  that's  the  pioneer 
spirit  too. 

Coming  into  town  as  an  outsider  I  was  in 
a  position  to  see  certain  things  that  were  not 
apparent  to  those  born  and  brought  up  here. 
That  is  always  possible  to  anyone  approaching 
a  new  business  with  his  eyes  open.  I  had 
found  it  so  when  I  began  work  as  a  ditch  dig- 
ger. Within  a  year  I  detected  flaws  to  which 
those  who  had  given  their  lives  to  construc- 
tion work  were  blind.  I  was  unburdened  with 
bewildering  details  and  prejudices.  So  in  this 
town  my  eyes  were  fresh  and  I  viewed  the  vil- 
lage not  altogether  from  the  unit  of  my  own 


188  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

farm  but  as  a  whole.  I  was  a  stockholder  in 
a  corporation  owning  a  million  and  more  dol- 
lars' worth  of  buildings  and  land,  and  employ- 
ing hundreds  of  hands.  Consequently  I  was 
able  to  consider  any  new  project  not  only  as  it 
affected  my  own  small  interest  but  as  it 
affected  the  whole  corporation.  The  question 
of  raising  our  own  meats  then  was  not  with 
me  merely  a  question  of  keeping  a  beef,  some 
sheep,  pigs  and  chickens  for  myself  but  a  mat- 
ter of  saving  the  corporation  the  thousands  of 
dollars  which  would  result  in  the  general  un- 
dertaking. So  it  was  natural  enough  to  me 
when  the  matter  of  buying  full-blooded  breed- 
ers came  up  which  were  beyond  the  means  of 
any  one  individual,  to  suggest  that  the  Pioneer 
Club,  which  represented  the  corporation,  should 
do  something  towards  making  this  easy.  I 
had  no  idea  of  any  general  cooperative  plan  in 
doing  this,  but  the  idea  was  just  the  spark 
needed  to  kindle  that  whole  burning  issue. 

We  wanted  a  good  Dorset  ram  which  would 
cost  in  the  neighborhood  of  a  hundred  dollars ; 
we  wanted  a  good  bull  which  would  cost  in  the 
neighborhood  of  six  hundred  dollars.  Unless 
a  man  went  into  either  business  extensively 
such  an  investment  wouldn't  pay.  It  seemed 


GETTING  TOGETHER  189 

natural  enough  then  for  us  all  to  club  together 
and  buy  shares.  But  if  we  did  this,  why 
shouldn't  we  do  more?  There  was  the  whole 
problem  of  marketing  still  confronting  us. 
We  had  solved  it  in  a  crude  way  last  spring- 
but  that  only  served  to  show  us  what  might 
be  done  with  a  perfected  organization.  Out 
of  this  was  born  with  scarcely  any  talk,  scarcely 
any  planning  and  almost  full  grown,  the 
scheme  which  finally  welded  us  into  one  com- 
pact business  firm — the  Pioneer  Products  Com- 
pany. The  idea  had  been  growing  all  this 
time  and  we  didn't  know  it.  When  we  did  rec- 
ognize it,  it  seemed  so  natural  and  obvious  that 
everyone  marveled  that  we  hadn't  thought  of 
it  from  the  beginning.  It's  merely  another  ex- 
ample of  what  a  rut  farming  folk  have  fallen 
into. 

There  isn't  any  business  on  the  face  of  the 
earth  that  lends  itself  so  readily  to  cooperation 
as  farming.  Every  country  village  consists  of 
a  small  compact  body  of  men  living  side  by 
side  and  almost  to  a  man  engaged  in  buying 
the  same  products,  manufacturing  the  same 
products  and  selling  the  same  products  to  the 
same  market.  And  these  products  are  the  uni- 
versal necessities  of  life.  It  might  be  possible 


190  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

for  men  to  get  along  without  coal,  without  oil, 
without  steel,  even  without  beef,  but  they  surely 
could  not  get  along  without  wheat  and  corn, 
without  vegetables,  without  eggs  and  milk. 
And  yet  these  communities  instead  of  holding 
the  world  by  the  throat  are  themselves  the 
prey  of  the  world  even  with  their  own  products. 
With  common  interests,  common  foes,  with  a 
common  plant  and  a  common  organization  they 
still  are  the  common  victims  of  a  hundred  di- 
versified outside  interests.  This  is  solely  be- 
cause the  outside  interests — like  the  banks 
— are  allowed  to  treat  with  them  as  small  weak 
units  instead  of  as  one  large  strong  unit.  And 
this  after  cooperation  has  been  taught  them 
by  their  government,  by  every  business  in  the 
land,  by  every  labor  organization.  It  is,  as  I 
have  said,  this  branch  of  the  pioneer  spirit 
which  has  been  both  their  salvation  and  their 
undoing.  But  that  it  is  possible  both  to  pre- 
serve this  and  curb  it  we  proved  to  our  satisfac- 
tion with  the  Pioneer  Products  Company. 

Holt  read  up  on  the  subject  and  he  found 
that  cooperative  farming  which  was  so  novel  to 
us  in  the  East  had  long  been  in  successful  op- 
eration in  the  West  and  South.  That's  just 
the  point.  So  are  a  hundred  other  good  things. 


GETTING  TOGETHER  191 

We  in  the  East  have  urged  our  young  farmers 
West  until  we  have  drained  the  East  of  its 
best.  We  have  sent  them  forth  like  mission- 
aries in  such  numbers  that  now  we  need  some 
of  them  back  as  missionaries  to  ourselves.  It's 
those  same  men  in  the  West  who  have  been 
first  to  seize  upon  the  new  ideas  in  agriculture, 
while  their  eastern  brothers  have  gone  along 
in  the  same  old  ruts.  New  England  as  a 
whole  has  been  treated  like  one  vast  deserted 
farm  not  worth  anyone's  trouble.  The  Gov- 
ernment itself  treats  it  as  such.  It's  eager 
enough  to  spend  millions  on  draining  projects 
in  Florida  or  irrigation  projects  in  the  West 
while  there  are  whole  townships  in  the  State 
of  Maine  in  as  primeval  a  condition  as  they 
were  at  the  landing  of  the  Pilgrims.  It's 
actually  so.  If  Maine  were  located  in  Oregon 
it  would  be  to-day  the  richest  State  in  the 
Union.  But  as  sure  as  fate  the  old  world  pio- 
neers will  soon  rediscover  it  if  we  don't  our- 
selves, for  to  them  Maine  is  the  Far  West. 

I  find  I  get  switched  back  to  that  theme  ev- 
ery time  I  trace  a  new  feature  of  our  develop- 
ment. 

As  I  said,  Holt  read  up  on  the  subject  of  co- 
operative farming  as  he  always  read  up  on 


I92  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

every  new  subject  before  tackling  it.  About 
the  first  thing  he  ran  into  was  the  history  of 
the  Eastern  Shore  of  Virginia  Produce  Ex- 
change— an  enterprise  which  reads  like  ro- 
mance. Every  farmer  in  New  England  ought 
to  read  it.  Holt  gave  a  talk  on  it  before  the 
club  and  everyone  listened  in  amazement. 
Here  was  a  good  farming  country  settled  by 
industrious  well-meaning  farmers  who  raised 
good  stuff,  but  who  in  1899  found  themselves 
on  the  verge  of  bankruptcy.  It  was  each  man 
for  himself  and  sometimes  they  sold  their  crops 
for  half  what  it  cost  to  raise  them.  As  indi- 
viduals they  couldn't  reach  their  market  with- 
out giving  up  their  profits  to  commission  men 
and  railroads.  Then  someone  organized  the 
exchange  and  so  poor  were  its  members  that 
a  membership  fee  of  only  five  dollars  was 
charged  with  the  privilege  of  paying  only 
twenty-five  cents  down  and  the  rest  in  install- 
ments. During  the  first  year  the  organization 
shipped  four  hundred  thousand  barrels  of  pro- 
duce; ten  years  later  it  was  shipping  one  mil- 
lion four  hundred  thousand  barrels.  It  now 
handles  every  year  one  million  barrels  of  Irish 
potatoes  and  eight  hundred  thousand  barrels 
of  sweet  potatoes.  During  the  last  three  years 


GETTING  TOGETHER  193 

it  has  done  an  average  business  of  two  million 
five  hundred  thousand  dollars  a  year.  It  has 
lifted  a  stagnant  community  into  a  prosperous 
community  within  a  decade. 

Another  example  was  the  Southern  Texas 
Truck  Growers'  Association  which  was  or- 
ganized in  1905.  At  that  time  the  farmers 
were  producing  about  five  hundred  car  loads  of 
onions  a  year  and  not  making  a  living  from 
them.  The  following  year  they  shipped  nine 
hundred  cars;  the  next  year  one  thousand 
cars;  the  next  year  two  thousand  cars,  and 
in  1910  twenty-five  hundred  cars  valued  at  one 
million  five  hundred  thousand  dollars. 

We  had  twenty  more  such  examples  for  en- 
couragement but  we  didn't  need  any  of  them. 
Our  own  needs  suggested  our  own  remedy  and 
that  spring  the  Pioneer  Products  Company 
took  out  its  charter. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

FINDING   OURSELVES 

The  Pioneer  Products  Company  was  capi- 
talized for  three  thousand  dollars.  Shares 
were  sold  for  a  dollar  each,  but  each  member 
was  required  to  purchase  five  shares  and  not 
allowed  to  purchase  more  than  twenty.  Our 
object  as  set  forth  in  the  constitution  was  "the 
buying,  selling,  and  handling  of  produce;  the 
selling  and  consigning  of  produce  as  agent  of 
the  producer;  the  inspection  of  all  produce  so 
consigned;  and  the  owning  and  operating  of 
whatsoever  shall  be  deemed  to  the  advantage 
of  the  producer." 

The  active  management  was  to  be  in  the 
hands  of  the  general  manager,  who  was  to  re- 
ceive a  small  salary,  and  the  secretary-treas- 
urer. One  of  the  most  important  provisions 
reads  as  follows:  "All  stockholders  in  the 
company  shall  be  compelled  to  ship  through  the 
company." 

This  was  inserted  as  a  protection  against  the 
194 


FINDING  OURSELVES  195 

bribing  of  members  by  city  commission  men 
whose  object  might  be  to  break  up  the  organiza- 
tion by  offering,  for  a  time,  higher  prices. 

Our  plan  for  distribution  of  profits  provided 
that  after  all  expenses  were  paid  a  dividend 
not  exceedng  ten  per  cent,  mght  be  voted ;  that 
after  this  a  sum  amounting  to  a  tax  of  not 
over  one  dollar  a  share  should  be  reserved 
from  the  surplus  as  a  reserve  fund,  and  the 
remainder  distributed  among  members  in  pro- 
portion to  the  amount  of  business  done. 

A  board  of  five  directors  elected  by  mem- 
bers was  to  have  general  supervision  of  the 
business  with  power  to  adjust  all  grievances. 

There  you  have  it  in  a  nutshell.  Our  or- 
ganization was  unique  in  that  it  was  founded 
on  a  social  club  already  well  established.  We 
elected  for  the  company  the  same  board  which 
had  so  successfully  governed  the  club.  I  was 
elected  secretary-treasurer  and  accepted  the 
duty  because  I  knew  I  was  in  a  better  position 
to  undertake  the  work  than  anyone  else.  We 
elected  Holt  as  manager  and  he  accepted  the 
position  in  a  like  spirit,  although  he  knew  it 
would  demand  a  great  deal  of  time  from  him. 
We  couldn't  have  had  a  better  man.  He 
jumped  into  the  office  like  one  whose  fortune 


196  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

depended  upon  the  outcome.  He  began  to 
make  a  thorough  study  of  market  conditions, 
and  got  into  touch  at  once  with  two  or  three 
big  commission  men.  He  haunted  the  markets 
and  asked  as  many  questions  as  though  he 
were  a  member  of  a  congressional  investigat- 
ing committee.  He  studied  the  transportation 
problem,  and  as  a  result  soon  sprang  a  brand 
new  idea  on  us  which  went  a  long  way  towards 
making  that  first  season  successful.  He  had 
nosed  around  the  city  and  found  a  second-hand 
auto  truck  which  could  be  bought  at  a  bar- 
gain. Our  town  was  on  a  state  road  which 
was  kept  in  good  condition  and  he  figured  that 
by  using  the  truck,  counting  in  depreciation, 
interest  and  running  expenses,  we  could  effect 
a  freight  reduction  of  over  fifty  per  cent,  by 
transporting  our  own  produce.  Furthermore, 
this  would  leave  us  independent  of  train  sched- 
ules and  free  to  ship  early  or  late  as  might 
suit  our  convenience.  He  was  so  enthusiastic 
over  the  project  that  he  offered  to  contribute 
towards  its  purchase  the  salary  of  six  hundred 
dollars  we  had  voted  him.  I  mention  this  to 
show  what  a  fine  spirit  this  man  Holt  had. 
It's  the  sort  of  spirit  that  would  make  a  suc- 
cess of  any  reputable  venture.  I'm  also  glad 


FINDING  OURSELVES  197 

to  mention  that  the  company  for  its  part  showed 
an  equally  fine  spirit.  The  board  recom- 
mended the  purchase,  and  the  stockholders  to 
a  man  voted  to  accept  the  recommendation,  but 
to  a  man  voted  not  to  accept  Holt's  contribu- 
tion. Now  that's  the  sort  of  feeling  that  lies 
at  the  basis  of  real  cooperation.  That's  the 
sort  of  feeling  which  the  two  previous  winters 
had  made  possible.  There  wasn't  a  man  in  the 
club  who  didn't  appreciate  Holt's  efforts  and 
want  him  to  get  a  fair  return  for  his  work. 
That  feeling  was  worth  ten  thousand  dollars 
to  the  club. 

The  next  thing  we  did  was  to  make  a  can- 
vass of  the  club  to  find  out  how  many  men  were 
able  and  willing  to  add  to  their  live  stock.  It 
was  urged  that  every  Pioneer  Club  member 
should  keep  at  least  a  few  hens  and  a  pig,  and 
there  was  none  who  was  not  ready  to  accept 
this  suggestion. 

"We  oughtn't  to  find  a  member  of  this  club 
buying  an  egg  or  a  fowl  from  this  time  on," 
I  said.  "If  by  any  chance  a  member  does  find 
it  necessary  he  ought  to  buy  of  another  mem- 
ber. It's  absurd  for  any  live  dweller  in  the 
country  ever  to  spend  his  good  money  for  such 
things.  It's  more;  it's  a  disgrace. 


198  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Moreover  we  shouldn't  find  within  an- 
other year  any  member  of  this  club  paying  from 
twelve  to  fourteen  cents  a  pound  for  salt  pork, 
or  sixteen  cents  a  pound  for  lard,  or  twenty- 
five  cents  a  pound  for  bacon,  when  it  would  al- 
most pay  every  man  in  the  club  to  keep  pigs 
for  the  dressing  alone.  Our  forefathers  would 
no  more  have  thought  of  getting  along  without 
a  pig  than  they  would  a  well.  No  more  should 
we.  The  packers  have  made  it  easy  for  us  to 
buy  rather  than  raise.  So  does  everyone  else 
who  wants  our  money.  That's  the  big  tempta- 
tion which  has  been  our  undoing — this  biting 
to  the  bait  of  the  easiest  way.  It's  nothing  but 
a  new  form  of  taxation  which  we  have  been 
too  indifferent  to  throw  off,  until  now  we  have 
the  habit  and  think  we  can't.  It's  a  pretty  safe 
guess  that  the  easiest  way  is  never  the  profita- 
ble way  in  anything.  We've  tried  the  other 
with  poor  results ;  now  let's  try  the  new  way — 
the  pioneer  way." 

The  question  of  raising  beef  and  lamb  how- 
ever was  not  quite  so  general  a  one,  as  it  took 
more  capital.  However  we  found  some  twenty 
men  who  were  willing  to  undertake  the  experi- 
ment to  an  extent  which  made  it  seem  worth 
while  for  the  rest  of  the  club  to  help  finance 


FINDING  OURSELVES  199 

the  undertaking.  It  resulted  in  the  purchase 
of  a  Dorset  ram  and  a  good  Holstein  bull.  A 
member  was  found  who  was  willing  to  care  for 
the  animals  in  return  for  the  free  use  of  them 
himself.  In  addition  he  was  allowed  to  charge 
a  nominal  fee  which  should  cover  the  interest 
of  the  money  invested  by  the  club. 

This  was  in  February,  and  a  few  weeks  later 
with  the  stock  fully  subscribed  we  began  our 
second  campaign.  As  Holt  made  clear  in  a 
talk  to  the  club  this  company  was  not  in  and 
of  itself  any  royal  road  to  fortune.  It  was  no 
short  cut  to  success. 

"It  means  harder  work  than  ever  on  our 
part,"  he  said.  "The  company  will  prosper  or 
fail  by  our  own  efforts.  Don't  forget  that  be- 
fore we  can  sell  anything  we  must  have  some- 
thing to  sell.  It  may  be  different  in  Wall 
Street,  but  that's  a  cold  fact  in  our  business. 
We  must  have  more  produce  and  better  pro- 
duce. Understand,  it  must  be  better.  Now 
that  we  have  given  ourselves  a  name,  that  name 
must  be  made  to  stand  for  something.  Up  to 
now  we  have  been  anonymous,  but  from  this 
point  on  we  can't  be.  I  want  our  name  to  be 
not  only  for  our  own  protection,  but  for  the  pro- 
tection of  our  customers.  I  want  the  Pioneer 


200  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Products  Company  to  stand  for  the  best  and 
freshest  and  cheapest  vegetables  to  be  pur- 
chased. That's  the  boast  I'm  making;  that's 
the  boast  I'm  going  right  on  making  and  you 
must  back  me  up  in  it.  You  must  turn  more 
soil  this  year  than  last  and  you  must  give  more 
care  to  your  stuff.  You  must  work  harder. 
Don't  forget  that  this  isn't  any  easy  way.  For 
twenty  years  you've  fooled  around  with  the 
easy  way — raising  as  little  as  you  could  with 
as  little  work  as  possible.  This  is  the  hard 
way — raising  all  you  can  and  putting  into  the 
effort  every  ounce  in  you.  But  it's  the  only 
way,  and  if  you'll  stand  back  of  me  we'll  make 
this  the  biggest  year  our  village  ever  had. 
Are  you  back  of  me  ?" 

"You  bet  we  are/'  came  a  chorus. 

They  proved  it,  too,  by  the  preparations  they 
made.  We  announced  the  same  prize  awards 
that  we  made  last  year.  With  the  money 
which  had  been  turned  back  and  with  the  sur- 
plus we  had  made  on  our  moving  picture  show 
we  were  able  to  do  this  without  going  to  the 
local  merchants.  I'm  confident,  however,  we 
could  have  raised  from  the  latter  twice  as  much 
as  we  needed  if  we  had  tried.  For  the  first 
time  in  a  generation  they  had  found  their  cred- 


FINDING  OURSELVES  201 

its  decreasing  to  an  amount  that  more  than 
paid  for  their  investment  in  the  Pioneer  Club. 
At  the  same  time  their  business  had  increased. 
However,  we  didn't  want  our  prizes  to  be  so 
large  as  to  make  them  an  end  in  themselves, 
and  we  didn't  wish  to  increase  their  number  to 
a  point  that  would  destroy  competition.  Fur- 
thermore we  didn't  have  half  the  need  of  stim- 
ulation that  we  had  last  year.  Our  people  were 
now  stockholders  in  a  company  and  had  the 
company  to  work  for.  Furthermore  they  had 
the  inspiration  of  last  season's  success  to  urge 
them  on.  I  tell  you  that  just  the  decreased 
household  expenses  of  last  winter  made  them 
realize  what  it  meant  to  keep  their  land  busy. 

I  figured  that  at  least  thirty  per  cent,  more 
land  was  turned  this  spring.  If  our  town  had 
looked  busy  last  year  it  was  a  regular  bee-hive 
this  year.  We  were  also  better  prepared  to 
do  our  own  work.  Several  horses  had  been 
bought  during  the  winter  and  many  men  had 
invested  in  plows  and  harrows  so  that  they 
were  able  not  only  to  do  their  own  work  but 
that  of  their  neighbors  too.  We  called  in  some 
outside  help,  but  not  much,  which  was  a  big 
satisfaction. 

There  was  little  skepticism  this  season  about 


202  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

the  worth  of  the  methods  we  had  followed  last. 
Everyone  had  had  better  crops  than  ever  be- 
fore, even  if  in  some  cases  they  hadn't  come 
up  to  all  that  had  been  hoped  for.  Also  there 
had  been  a  good  deal  of  swapping  of  experi- 
ences during  the  winter  with  a  result  of  much 
information  in  regard  to  seeds  that  was  of 
value.  I  realized  that  in  a  general  way 
we  already  were  beginning  to  sift  out  the 
things  for  which  our  land  was  best  adapted. 
It  was  the  beginning  of  specialization.  I 
hoped  however  that  this  wouldn't  be  carried 
too  far,  because  I  believed  and  still  believe  that 
our  success  would  lie  more  in  the  line  of  gen- 
eral farming  than  special  farming.  Above  all 
things  I  believe  that  every  community  should 
first  of  all  supply  itself.  That  is  a  pioneer  idea 
that  spells  safety.  Every  dollar  saved  is  more 
than  a  dollar  earned  in  most  cases;  it  often 
amounts  to  two  dollars  earned. 

I  had  had  such  success  last  year  with  my 
potatoes  that  I  determined  to  put  in  another 
five  acres,  making  ten  in  all.  I  expected  Had- 
ley  to  approve  of  this  inasmuch  as  results  had 
contradicted  every  prophecy  he  had  made. 
However,  he  only  shook  his  head. 

"I  say  let  well  'nuff  be.     Ye  was  just  plumb 


FINDING  OURSELVES  203 

lucky  last  year,  but  ef  ye  try  again  ye'll  lose  all 
ye  made." 

You  can't  beat  Hadley's  pessimism.  If  you 
fail  he'll  tell  you  he  knew  you  would;  if  you 
succeed  he'll  advise  you  not  to  tempt  fate  again. 
So  far  as  I  know  he  was  the  only  man  in  the 
village  who  was  still  stuck  in  his  tracks.  I 
tried  once  more  to  persuade  him  to  till  his  own 
soil  but  he  refused.  He  was  living  fairly  com- 
fortably on  the  wages  I  paid  him  and  was  con- 
tent to  let  matters  rest  there.  Even  in  the  face 
of  the  profits  he  had  seen  me  reap,  he  only  re- 
plied, "Ain't  no  use  farmin'  round  here.  Farm- 
in's  dead." 

I  kept  my  vegetable  garden  much  as  I  had 
it  before,  but  I  put  in  another  acre  of  white 
beans.  Beans  and  potatoes — it  looked  to  me 
as  though  any  farmer  in  New  England  ought 
to  make  a  living  from  those  two  things  alone. 
They  are  as  staple  as  gold  and  the  market  for 
them  is  unlimited.  That  is  especially  true  of 
beans,  for  they  keep  indefinitely. 

I  ought  also  to  say  that  my  apple  trees  this 
second  spring  showed  the  result  of  the  care 
that  had  been  given  them.  They  looked  so 
hardy  and  strong  that  it  was  almost  impossi- 
ble to  believe  that  they  had  the  burden  of  fifty 


204  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

years'  neglect  back  of  them.  They  blossomed 
well  and  I  expected  a  good  deal  from  them. 

In  the  meanwhile  Holt  was  working  harder 
than  ever  with  a  view  to  providing  us  with  the 
best  possible  market.  We  talked  over  any 
number  of  schemes.  We  considered  the  ad- 
visability of  hiring  a  market  stall  in  the  city 
market  for  our  own  produce,  but  that  involved 
not  only  a  good  deal  of  expense  but  active  com- 
petition with  men  who  made  retail  selling  their 
business.  We  couldn't  afford  to  hire  more  help 
and  it  looked  unwise  to  attempt  to  undertake 
this  without  the  aid  of  an  experienced  man. 

Then  we  considered  an  attempt  to  work  up 
a  line  of  private  customers  and  deliver  our  pro- 
duce to  them  direct.  This  again  involved  an 
initial  expense  for  teams  and  men  that  we 
couldn't  afford  and  also  the  services  of  someone 
who  could  give  more  time  to  the  management 
of  the  project  than  Holt  could  spare. 

In  the  end  it  seemed  inevitable  that  we 
should  use  a  commission  man.  But — here's 
the  point — we  were  now  collectively  in  a  po- 
sition to  come  to  fairer  terms  with  a  middle- 
man than  we  had  been  as  individuals.  If  one 
man  handled  all  our  produce  he  could  afford  to 
pay  us  more.  Our  experience  with  Barnes  had 


FINDING  OURSELVES  205 

been  fairly  satisfactory  but  he  was  only  a  com- 
mission agent  and  it  didn't  seem  to  Holt  that 
he  offered  now  as  good  terms  as  we  ought  to 
get.  Undoubtedly  we  should  have  had  to  ac- 
cept those  if  Holt  hadn't  run  across  a  young 
fellow  by  the  name  of  Burlington.  He  was 
just  the  man  we  needed.  He  was  a  young  fel- 
low starting  in  the  retail  business  for  himself 
and  needed  our  produce  as  much  as  we  needed 
him.  Holt  made  fast  to  him  at  once.  After 
his  first  interview  with  Burlington  Holt  came 
back  to  me  enthusiastic. 

''He's  the  temporary  solution  of  the  selling 
end,"  he  exclaimed.  "He  has  the  market  stall, 
he  knows  the  game,  and  he  has  a  clientele. 
That  much  he  has  already  invested  for  us. 
Now  what  I  propose  to  do  is  to  take  him  into 
partnership." 

"Have  you  got  as  far  as  that  with  him  ?" 

"Not  yet,"  answered  Holt,  "but  that's  what 
it's  coming  to.  If  we  give  him  stuff  enough 
he  can  afford  to  handle  it  on  a  basis  of  ten 
per  cent,  over  his  expenses,  which  will  be  an- 
other five  per  cent.  That's  some  better  than 
the  thirty  per  cent,  that  we've  been  paying." 

"It  surely  is,"  I  agreed,  "but  he  hasn't  agreed 
to  it  yet." 


206  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

"Not  yet,"  answered  Holt  without  showing 
any  sign  of  being  worried.  "I'm  going  to 
bring  him  out  here  some  Sunday  and  show  him 
our  plant." 

A  week  or  so  later  Holt  brought  Burlington 
out.  He  was  a  clean-cut,  wide-awake  young 
fellow  of  thirty  and  I  liked  him  at  once.  We 
had  him  up  to  dinner  and  after  that  took  him 
to  drive  around  the  village.  We  showed  him 
some  five  hundred  acres  of  land  under  cultiva- 
tion— under  real  cultivation.  We  showed  him 
acres  upon  acres  which  had  been  harrowed  and 
worked  until  they  looked  like  front  lawns  ready 
for  seed.  We  told  him  that  the  produce  from 
every  inch  of  that  ground  would  pass  through 
the  Pioneer  Company  except  what  was  used  at 
home.  It  was  just  like  one  big  farm. 

He  was  amazed.  Then  he  exclaimed,  "Say, 
you  fellows  have  hit  it  right  if  you  can  keep  it 
up." 

"Just  you  watch  us,"  I  said. 

He  laughed.  "I  don't  need  to  watch  any- 
one but  Holt  here,"  he  answered.  "And,  be- 
lieve me,  I  certainly  have  got  to  watch  him  if 
I'm  going  to  make  a  cent  out  of  the  deal." 

"Don't  get  that  idea,"  Holt  broke  in,  taking 
him  seriously.  "We  want  you  to  make  a  fair 


FINDING  OURSELVES  207 

profit  and  we'll  see  that  you  do.  We  want 
you  to  feel  like  one  of  us — a  sort  of  partner." 

"Hadn't  thought  of  it  that  way,"  answered 
Burlington,  "but  I  believe  that's  the  right  way 
to  look  at  it.  And  say,  I  wouldn't  mind  living 
out  here  myself.  Anything  in  farms  to  be  had 
around  here  at  a  reasonable  figure?" 

"Is  now,"  I  answered,  "but  there  won't  be 
five  years  from  now." 

I  didn't  know  whether  he  was  in  earnest  or 
not,  but  less  than  two  months  later  he  bought 
the  Smalley  place — a  good  house  and  ten  acres 
of  land  at  the  lower  end  of  High  Street.  That 
was  a  good  move  for  him  and  a  good  move  for 
us.  It  gave  us  confidence  in  him  and  made 
him  really  one  of  us.  He  joined  the  Pioneer 
Club  at  once  and  I  sold  him  five  shares  of  stock 
out  of  my  twenty  in  the  Pioneer  Products  Com- 
pany so  that  he  could  join  us,  though  I  hated  to 
part  with  it.  There  were  some  who  were  sus- 
picious of  his  motives,  but  I  wasn't,  and  it 
wasn't  long  before  he  proved  himself  one  of 
the  live  wires  of  the  company.  His  knowledge 
of  the  market  was  invaluable  to  us,  and  later 
on  was  an  important  factor  in  guiding  us  con- 
cerning what  to  plant. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   GOOSE   HANGS    HIGH 

Things  went  well  with  us  that  second  sea- 
son. Much  of  the  novelty  of  the  undertaking 
had  worn  off  but  none  of  the  enthusiasm  and 
everyone  settled  down  to  hard,  steady  work. 
The  prizes  were  still  a  big  incentive  and  the 
hundred  dollars  in  new  bills  which  Holt  con- 
tinued to  exhibit  in  Moulton's  store  window 
was  still  as  much  a  center  of  interest  and  ex- 
cited curiosity  as  money  in  a  museum.  But 
there  was  more  a  feeling  of  security  and  con- 
fidence than  the  year  before.  Our  past  suc- 
cess was  somewhat  responsible  for  this,  but 
the  Pioneer  Products  Company  was  more  so. 
There  seemed  to  be  a  feeling  now  that  we  were 
on  a  solid  business  basis.  The  cooperation 
idea — the  mere  fact  of  organization — and  the 
sight  of  stock  certificates  made  our  members 
feel  more  like  real  business  men  than  ever  be.- 
fore  they  had  felt  in  their  lives.  And  that  was 

208 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         209 

good  for  them.  It  steadied  them  and  made 
them  take  their  work  more  seriously. 

That  was  a  good  season  for  crops.  Our 
small  stuff  came  along  early  and  did  well.  By 
the  last  of  June  we  were  shipping  lettuce  and 
radishes  and  by  the  first  week  in  July  early 
peas.  Of  course  hothouse  stuff  had  been  in 
the  market  long  before  this  but  Burlington  was 
able  to  quote  prices  that  furnished  him  a  ready 
market.  Not  only  were  the  prices  right  but 
produce  was  right.  There  isn't  much  doubt 
but  what  stuff  grown  in  a  normal  way  without 
being  forced  has  certain  qualities  that  you  can't 
get  in  hothouse  products.  The  longer  I  farm 
the  more  respect  I  have  for  Nature  as  a  busi- 
ness partner.  She  is  always  square  and  above 
board  but  she  is  also  a  stern  mistress  in  the 
matter  of  justice.  You  can't  ever  get  some- 
thing for  nothing  from  her.  She'll  beat  you 
every  time  you  try  it.  If  you  try  to  hurry  her 
well  and  good,  you  can,  but  you'll  pay  for  your 
early  stuff  at  cost  of  flavor.  If  you  go  in  for 
flavor,  well  and  good,  but  you'll  pay  for  that  at 
the  cost  of  size.  Let  her  alone  and  she'll  bal- 
ance things. 

We  shipped  eight  hundred  dollars'  worth  of 
produce  the  last  week  in  June  and  through  July 


210  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

our  shipment  amounted  to  three  thousand  dol- 
lars a  week,  jumping  in  August  to  five  thou- 
sand dollars  and  over  a  week.  Holt  appointed 
an  assistant  to  see  that  everything  submitted 
was  up  to  standard.  This  man  had  authority 
to  discard  anything  offered,  but  any  farmer 
who  felt  that  he  was  being  discriminated 
against  could  submit  the  refused  article  that 
night  to  Holt.  It  may  be  well  to  mention 
that  not  a  man  disputed  the  first  judgment  that 
summer.  As  members  of  the  corporation  they 
realized  that  it  was  as  much  to  their  interest  as 
anyone's  to  preserve  our  standard. 

Our  motor  truck  was  a  great  success,  re- 
ducing our  transportation  charges  almost  fifty 
per  cent.  Not  only  this,  but  as  time  went  on 
we  found  that  at  the  same  cost  it  would  have 
paid  for  itself  in  the  matter  of  convenience 
alone.  We  reached  the  market  earlier  and 
were  able  to  make,  as  we  did  later  in  the  sea- 
son, two  and  three  trips  a  day,  so  always  get- 
ting our  stuff  to  the  market  fresh. 

Early  in  September,  when  we  began  to  get 
new  potatoes  and  early  apples,  our  sales  jumped 
to  six  thousand  dollars  a  week.  Some  of  this 
we  shipped  by  freight.  Never  before  had  any- 
one in  our  town,  except  Dardoni,  ever  marketed 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         211 

his  early  apples.  A  few  bushels  would  be 
taken  to  the  store  but  as  a  rule  what  couldn't 
be  made  into  pies  or  eaten  by  the  small  boys 
were  allowed  to  rot  on  the  ground.  As  for 
crab  apples — and  nearly  every  farm  had  at 
least  one  tree — what  a  few  housewives  did  not 
put  up  in  jelly  met  the  same  fate.  I've  seen 
bushels  of  plump  red  crabs  rotting  on  the 
ground.  But  not  this  season.  In  the  first 
place,  Ruth  all  winter  had  urged  the  wives  to 
put  up  more  preserves  and  the  result  was 
marked.  Farmers  had  to  get  up  early  to  get 
ahead  of  their  wives  and  gather  any  to  send 
to  town,  but  they  found  a  ready  market  for  all 
they  could  send.  I  reckoned  as  clear  profit  to 
the  village  every  apple  sent  and  the  total 
amounted  to  a  good  many  dollars. 

For  that  matter  you  could  reckon  as  clear 
profit  about  all  the  garden  stuff  we  sent  for 
it's  certain  it  represented  money  which  until 
now  had  not  been  coming  in.  Potatoes  and 
beans  were  all  that  had  ever  found  their  way 
to  market  until  now.  When  I  look  back  I  won- 
der how  these  people  ever  lived  on  what  they 
raised.  In  any  real  sense  they  didn't  and  what 
was  true  of  our  town  is  true  to-day  of  a  hun- 
dred other  towns  in  New  England.  You  can 


212  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

find  conditions  of  poverty  right  out  under  God's 
blue  sky  that  would  make  your  hardened  settle- 
ment worker  shudder  with  horror. 

Everything  went  well  with  us  that  second 
season  as  I  said,  and  for  that  reason  it  isn't 
particularly  interesting  to  me.  On  the  first  of 
October  we  found  that  we  had  done  a  business 
of  sixty-seven  thousand  eight  hundred  dollars. 
In  round  figures  this  left  after  deducting  com- 
mission and  expenses  sixty  thousand  dollars. 
Out  of  this  we  declared  a  ten  per  cent,  divi- 
dend to  stockholders,  which  amounted  to  six 
thousand  dollars.  Three  thousand  more,  or 
one  dollar  a  share,  we  put  aside  into  our  re- 
serve fund.  This  left  fifty-one  thousand  dol- 
lars to  be  distributed  on  the  basis  of  the  amount 
of  produce  turned  in.  We  had  that  year  four 
hundred  and  twenty-one  members  which  made 
our  net  profits  figure  up  per  capita  a  little  over 
one  hundred  and  twenty  dollars. 

Now  it's  impossible  for  anyone  to  figure  on 
whether  that  was  a  fair  return  for  the  amount 
of  capital  invested  in  our  plant  or  not.  In  the 
first  place  that  doesn't  by  any  means  represent 
the  value  of  our  produce.  You  must  take  into 
account  the  amount  consumed  by  our  home 
market,  the  amount  in  hay  and  corn  and  pota- 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         213 

toes  and  beans  and  what  not  which  we  kept 
on  hand  for  winter  consumption  and  a  hun- 
dred other  things.  And  besides — and  this  is 
something  I  want  to  emphasize  over  and  over 
again — if  you  could  figure  the  total  it  would 
all  be  beside  the  point.  The  fact  which  counted 
with  us  wasn't  whether  or  not  we  were  getting 
full  value  from  our  plant  as  yet.  We  weren't, 
and  we  knew  it.  The  point  was  that  we  were 
getting  something  where  before  we  got  noth- 
ing. If  we  hadn't  shipped  five  thousand  dol- 
lars' worth  of  produce  that  second  season  we 
should  have  called  our  enterprise  a  success. 
We  had  waked  up!  We  were  trying!  We 
were  using  our  opportunities!  Our  old  men 
were  interested  and  our  younger  men  enthu- 
siastic and  our  women  were  alive. 

In  looking  back — and  I  don't  have  to  look 
back  very  far — I  realize  more  than  ever  that 
the  Pioneer  Products  Company,  which  ex- 
presses the  result  of  our  labors  in  dollars  and 
cents,  is  by  no  means  as  important  even  now  as 
the  Pioneer  Club  which  expresses  itself  princi- 
pally in  pleasant  memories.  The  Pioneer 
Products  Company  is  making  us  secure  with 
modest  bank  accounts,  but  it  is  the  Pioneer 
Club  which  has  made  us  Sam  and  Josh  and 


214  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Frank  and  Bill  to  one  another,  and  our  wives 
Sam's  wife  and  Josh's  wife  and  Frank's  wife 
and  Bill's  wife.  It's  the  Pioneer  Club  that  has 
made  us  glad  we're  living  even  if  it's  the  P.  P. 
C.  that  has  made  it  possible  for  us  to  live.  It's 
the  Pioneer  Club  that  has  made  our  town  dear 
to  us  and  has  made  us  proud  that  we  live  here. 
It's  the  Pioneer  Club  that  is  the  heart  of  us 
through  the  long  winter  months,  though  we  are 
busier  then  than  we  used  to  be.  And  it's  the 
Pioneer  Club  again  that  is  keeping  us  sane  and 
healthy  in  our  prosperity. 

We  are  becoming  better  pioneers  every  year, 
though  there  are  people  who  think  we  are  go- 
ing back.  We  don't  care  an  awful  lot  about 
electric  lights  and  cement  sidewalks  as  some 
of  our  progressive  neighbors  do.  We  have 
the  best  streets  within  fifty  miles  of  us  and 
we  are  content  to  walk  in  them  or  in  foot- 
paths along  the  sides.  We  get  along  very  well 
with  kerosene  lamps  and  on  a  pinch  can  use 
candles.  We  have  good  schools  and  in  them 
are  using  some  methods  copied  from  our  South- 
ern neighbors.  We  try  as  far  as  possible  to 
teach  arithmetic  and  farming  together,  read- 
ing and  farming  together,  geography  and 
farming  together.  It's  just  as  good  exercise 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         215 

we  find  for  our  young  folks  to  figure  out  how 
much  five  bushels  of  potatoes  at  a  dollar  ten 
a  bushel  will  amount  to  as  it  is  for  them  to 
figure  out  how  much  five  times  one,  decimal, 
one  and  a  cipher  is.  It's  just  as  easy  for  them 
to  learn  to  read  by  reading  about  flowers  and 
simple  gardening  as  it  is  about  how  the  cat 
caught  the  rat.  It's  just  as  interesting  for 
them  to  learn  the  physical  geography  of  the 
world,  not  as  a  separate  study,  but  as  part  of 
their  dry-as-bones  boundary  statistics. 

We  are  encouraging  athletics  in  the  schools. 
We  are  backing  the  school  teams  with  our  at- 
tendance at  their  games  and  our  applause. 
It's  a  fact  that  the  average  country  boy  needs 
gymnasium  work  more  than  the  average  city 
boy.  He  needs  the  training,  the  drill  and  rou- 
tine work. 

We  are  teaching  our  girls  to  cook  and  sew. 
We  are  teaching  them  to  cook  and  sew  econom- 
ically. Both  our  women  and  our  girls  were 
getting  into  the  baker  shop  habit.  When  we 
started  in  we  were  buying  city-made  bread. 
Think  of  it,  in  the  country  of  home-made  bread, 
where  we  have  both  material  and  time!  We 
don't  buy  much  baker  stuff  now. 

We  don't  buy  as  much  patent  medicine  as 


216  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

we  did.  In  the  first  place,  there  isn't  a  store 
in  town — not  even  the  drug  store — which  car- 
ries it  any  more.  A  man  wouldn't  dare.  If 
you  want  any  of  the  stuff  you  have  to  send 
to  town  for  it,  and  while  this  is  still  being  done 
no  one  lets  anyone  know  he's  doing  it.  Those 
with  the  habit  get  it  and  swallow  it  the  way 
they  do  their  rum  and  most  of  them  know 
pretty  well  that  this  is  all  it  is. 

A  sad  event,  which  was  at  the  same  time  a 
mighty  good  thing  for  our  town,  was  the  death 
of  Dr.  Wentworth.  "Doc"  Wentworth  as  he 
was  known  to  everybody,  had  been  here  forty 
years.  He  was  a  big-hearted,  well-meaning 
type  of  family  physician,  but  the  amount  of 
morphine  he  prescribed  would  have  disgraced 
Chinatown.  It  was  his  one  antidote  for  pain 
and  he'd  give  it  for  a  toothache.  He  gave  it 
to  man,  woman  and  child.  Half  the  children 
in  town  took  paregoric  from  the  time  they  were 
born  until  they  were  old  enough  to  take 
straight  morphine.  It  was  wicked.  I  went  to 
one  of  the  big  medical  schools  and  had  a  talk 
with  the  Dean  and  recommended  this  village 
as  a  promising  field  for  some  good  young  physi- 
cian. The  result  was  that  a  young  man  set- 
tled among  us  of  whom  we  have  grown  very 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         217 

fond.  He  is  with  us  heart  and  soul  in  pre- 
venting disease  instead  of  fostering  it. 

We  don't  own  as  many  automobiles  as  some 
of  our  neighbors,  but  we  have  some  good  horses 
— good  work  horses  and  good  driving  horses. 
I  hope  to  see  better  stock  every  year.  I've  a 
two  year  old  I  wouldn't  swap  to-day  for  the 
finest  automobile  ever  manufactured.  Our  an- 
nual fair  is  developing  more  and  more  along 
the  lines  of  the  old  time  fair.  We  are  exhib- 
iting more  horses  and  cows  and  pigs  and  chick- 
ens because  we  have  some  now  worth  exhibit- 
ing. We  have  developed  quite  a  business  of 
selling  off  some  of  our  surplus  stock  at  this 
time.  We  find  that  the  neighboring  towns 
wait  for  this  event  to  select  their  breeders. 

To  go  back  to  the  Pioneer  Products  Com- 
pany for  a  moment  I  may  say  that  our  business 
has  increased  steadily  every  year.  Some 
things  we  have  dropped  because  we  find  no 
further  need  of  them.  For  instance  the  com- 
pany owns  no  more  breeding  stock.  Our  more 
prosperous  members  conduct  that  end  of  the 
business  themselves.  We  have,  however, 
bought  a  store  house. 

We  are  planning  a  new  experiment.  We 
found  that  a  surprising  lot  of  our  trade  was 


218  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

among  my  old  Little  Italy  friends.  They  be- 
came permanent  customers.  As  time  has 
gone  on  we  have  also  developed  a  regular 
clientele  outside  of  these — people  who  know  the 
Pioneer  Products  Company  by  name.  Our 
scheme  for  next  season  is  to  put  up  a  family 
hamper  to  be  delivered  regularly  through  the 
season.  This  will  contain  enough  of  the  new 
vegetables  to  last  a  family  a  week.  We  divide 
our  produce  into  firsts  and  seconds  and  deliver 
the  firsts  to  those  who  can  afford  to  pay  a  little 
more.  The  seconds  will  go  mostly  to  Little 
Italy.  The  latter  will  be  good  vegetables — 
fresh  and  sound,  differing  from  the  firsts  only 
in  size.  Burlington  is  to  have  charge  of  the 
distribution  on  his  usual  commission  basis.  He 
is  our  manager  now,  by  the  way,  paying  his 
salary  out  of  his  commission.  This  method 
will  give  us  a  steadier  market. 

Now  about  our  experiment  in  raising  our 
own  meat.  That,  too,  has  been  a  fair  suc- 
cess. The  local  butcher  fought  us  for  a  little 
while  but  his  fight  was  hopeless.  Understand, 
there  was  no  attempt  to  boycott  him  or  any- 
thing of  that  sort,  but  we  were  most  of  us 
raising  our  own  poultry  and  pork  and  besides 
that  we  weren't  eating  as  much  meat  as  we  did. 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         219 

Still  there  was  some  demand  chiefly  for  beef. 
We  made  a  proposition  to  the  man;  that  we 
turn  into  him  what  meats  we  produced  for  the 
local  market  and  that  he  handle  them  on  a 
basis  of  ten  per  cent,  net  profit.  He  thought 
it  over  for  a  little  while  and  then  accepted. 
He  has  made  a  good  thing  out  of  it  and  so  have 
we. 

I  don't  want  anyone  to  get  the  idea  that  our 
town  is  any  Utopia.  It  isn't.  It  is  nothing 
but  a  steady,  prosperous  farming  community 
where  everybody  is  a  hard  worker.  We  aren't 
doing  half  of  what  we  might,  but  our  satis- 
faction comes  in  knowing  we  are  doing  more 
than  we  did.  As  the  years  go  by  we  hope  to 
do  more.  There  isn't  any  reason  I  can  see 
why  as  a  town  we  shouldn't  be  in  the  position 
of  any  well-conducted  city  business  increasing 
our  efficiency  and  with  that  our  profits.  Real 
estate  has  almost  doubled  here,  and  this  hasn't 
been  a  fictitious  doubling.  It  is  based  on  what 
land  is  worth  to  the  investor  who  becomes  one 
of  us  and  uses  his  land  intelligently.  No  one 
can  buy  land  in  our  town,  loaf  on  it  and  share 
our  prosperity.  We  aren't  dividing  any  profits 
except  among  those  of  us  who  earn  them. 

People  have  come  to  our  town  and  tried  to 


220  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

locate  the  secret  of  our  modest  success  in  our 
land,  in  the  cooperative  idea,  in  our  favorable 
position  to  the  market,  in  just  our  bull  luck. 
Most  of  these  men  and  women  haven't  sense 
enough  to  be  worth  bothering  with.  I  haven't 
much  patience  with  those  who  look  to  find  the 
solution  of  all  our  difficulties  in  some  arbitrary 
system  that  doesn't  take  the  individual  into 
account.  But  now  and  then  comes  along  a 
man  who  is  in  earnest.  Then  I  take  him 
around  and  introduce  him  to  Josh  Chase.  He 
sees  a  long-legged,  thin-faced  fellow  with  skin 
as  bronze  as  a  skipper's.  Then  Josh  takes  the 
visitor  over  his  ten  acres  of  land  with  the  pride 
of  a  king.  He  shows  him  a  new  barn  and  all 
his  carefully  cared  for  farming  implements. 
He  takes  him  into  a  modest  story  and  a  half 
white  house  and  introduces  him  to  Mrs.  Josh 
and  a  couple  of  rosy-cheeked  children.  With 
half  an  eye  the  man  can  see  that  here  is  pros- 
perity of  the  best  kind. 

"Well?"  the  man  is  apt  to  ask  me. 

"He  isn't  afraid  of  the  rain  any  more,"  I 
say. 

"Well?" 

"That's   all.     It  means  he  isn't  afraid  of 


THE  GOOSE  HANGS  HIGH         221 

work.  He's  up  at  daybreak  every  morning  in 
the  year  and  his  work  isn't  done  till  dark.  But 
you  wouldn't  pick  him  out  as  a  slave,  would 
you?  He  doesn't  look  like  a  poor  downtrod- 
den savage,  does  he?  He's  a  man  with  a  hoe 
all  right  but  is  he  making  any  bid  for  your 
.sympathy?" 

"That's  because  your  cooperative  idea — 

"The  company  would  have  failed  the  second 
year  if  Josh  had  been  dependent  upon  that  idea 
and  not  the  idea  upon  him.  No,  sir,  that  man 
came  over  in  the  Mayflower  but  he  didn't  land 
till  about  five  years  ago.  If  you  don't  believe 
it  I'll  show  you  another  man  who  came  over  a 
little  earlier  and  who  isn't  a  member  of  our 
company  because  he  doesn't  need  even  that 
help." 

Then  I  take  him  round  and  introduce  him  to 
Dardoni. 

He  meets  the  smiling  black-haired  Italian 
and  sees  the  latter's  busy  acres  and  meets  an- 
other type  of  pioneer. 

If,  after  this,  the  investigator  is  of  a  mind 
that  prosperity  is  so  common  hereabouts  that 
anyone  can  succeed,  then  I  introduce  him  to  the 
awful  example.  That's  Hadley. 


222  NEW  LIVES  FOR  OLD 

Poor  old  Hadley — even  he  confided  in  me  the 
other  day  that  if  he  felt  real  pert  next  spring 
he  thought  he'd  put  that  patch  back  of  his 
house  into  potatoes. 


THE  END 


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